Catching up on the New York State Senate follies -- thanks to Governor Rod, we've got no shot at being the nation's no. 1 political laughingstock

"The members of this Conference have come a long way to consider the demands placed on the table. But frankly, we would rather wait two more years to take charge of the Senate than to simply serve the interests of the few. New York State cannot afford the type of self-serving politics being proposed and I will not be the leader to sacrifice what is right for New York for a quick political solution."

-- from a statement issued yesterday by New York State Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith [right], whose hopes to become leader of the Senate's new Democratic "majority" have become even murkier

by Ken

It just isn't fair. Here we New Yorkers figure we should have a lock on being the Nation's Leading Political Laughingstock with our State Senate's inability to figure out who's in charge. I mean, here it is well into December, and nobody can even hazard a guess as to who's going to be running the show come January. But darn if those rats in Illinois don't come up with that one-man carnival of political yuks, Gov. Rod Blagojevich. I mean, just the idea of a state being run by a man who's out on bail . . . how is our poor Senate Gang of Three supposed to compete with that?

You'll recall that in this election, at least nominally, Democrats took control of the State Senate for the first time since the LBJ landslide year election of 1964. As it happens, back then too hilarity ensued, as the Dems not only took control of the Senate for the first time in living memory but recaptured control of the State Assembly, and promptly found themselves hopelessly split between factions. I wrote about that last month , even as we were getting early signs that the State Senate Democrats' transition to majority status following four decades as a permanent minority might not be accomplished smoothly.

With the Democratic majority likely to wind up a razor-thin 32-30, meaning that there were no votes to spare, a "Gang of Four" Democratic senators with agendas of their own was threatening not to vote with their fellow Dems when it came to organize the Senate. That quickly metamorphosed into a Gang of Three, but if you subtract three votes from the Dems' nominal 32, that's quite enough to cause a heap of control trouble even if the three don't actually vote with the other side.

After the 1964 election, as I noted last month, once the Democrats finally managed to organize the legislature (only thanks to the intervention of Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who bludgeoned Republican legislators into voting with the one of the Democratic factions, just so he could restore the legislature to functional status in order to give him whatever he asked for, which was Governor Rockefeller's idea of the legislature's function), Democratic control of the Senate lasted a breathtakingly meager one year. Because of legal complications related to state legislators' inability to produce a redistricting plan (still from the 1960 census), the 1964 election was for a one-year legislative term, with another election to follow in November 1965. In that election the Democrats promptly surrendered control of the Senate back to the GOP

At that, one year of control may be better than they manage now. For several weeks it appeared that the hopeful leader of the new Senate Democratic majority, Malcolm Smith of Brooklyn, was prepared to accommodate the Gang of Three in utterly outrageous ways, with leadership positions of outrageously high and unwarranted authority to Sen.-elect Pedro Espada Jr. (whose complaint was that Latinos were underserved in the leadership, by which he seems to have meant he should get a nice job) and to Sen. Carl Kruger (whose complaint seems to have been that the leadership wasn't doing enough for him, even though he's hardly even a Democrat -- he votes so often with the Republicans that they actually gave him a committee chairmanship during their rule!), and with an outrageous promise to Sen. Ruben Diaz, a conservative minister, that no marriage-equality bill would make it to the Senate floor.

In the end, even if the Gang of Three considered itself amply bribed (and it's not clear that they did), a lot of other Senate Democrats, especially those who had been bypassed for jobs offered to Espada and Kruger, and of course those who objected to the party's policy on marriage equality being tailored to appease the homophobic Diaz, rebelled. However belatedly, Senator Smith came to his senses. (Paul Schindler has an excellent survey of this wacky story on Gay City News. It has been of obvious interest and concern to the LGBT community.)

Of course none of this speaks well for Senator Smith's long-term leadership prospects, and already state Democrats are scrounging among the more senior members of the Senate caucus for some more hopeful prospect. The problem, of course, is that they're looking for leadership in a body where Democrats have had no real function for four decades. There are some terrific people there, but it's hard to think of one who could command support on a statewide basis.


WAS THE NYS SENATE MESS AVOIDABLE? IS THERE
A LESSON FOR THE STATE AND NATIONAL PARTIES?

All through the general election, and even more pointedly since Election Day, my colleague Debra Cooper, a veteran of much NYS Democratic trench warfare, has been hollering to anyone who'll listen that there was a good chance of just such a mess, thanks to the campaign philosophy of the national Democratic Party, or rather the Obama campaign, which became functionally one and the same thing. In New York and other important royal-blue states, down-ticket races were ignored and available political resources, financial and human, were sucked up to be devoted to politicking in other states. With New York State's electoral votes in the bag for Senator Obama, large quantities of in-state party campaign cash and labor were put to work phone-banking and otherwise toiling in the presidential race in contested states like Pennsylvania.

The price, Debra has argued, was the loss of a number of marginal legislative districts that with even a little more campaign muscle could well have been flipped. Even now the margin of reelection victory of Queens Republican Sen. Frank Padavan is so thin that it's not beyond legal challenge. Winning just that seat, which should have been within Democrats' grasp, would have remapped the Senate majority to 33-29, and we see what a difference that would have been made. Debra argues that other Senate seats might also have been winnable had a bit more of our own campaign resources been expended in-state.

Surely several more congressional districts might have been flipped as well. The same seems true for California, where we heard months of reports of enormous quantities of in-state Democratic campaign resources being devoted to the presidential contest in contested states. Some of those unbearably slimy California Republican Howie writes about so much got a free ride, or at any rate a freer one than they might have.

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