Liberal Arts (New Republic discloses Pataki's Liberalism)

It's probably fair to say that most of the people attending the New York State Conservative Party's fortieth-anniversary dinner last month came for one reason only: Vice President Dick Cheney. But if, like most of the journalists and half of the guests, they filed out of the midtown Sheraton ballroom shortly after Cheney's speech, they missed the most entertaining part of the evening. Around 8:30 p.m., after dessert had been served and all the VIPs had been introduced (from Al D'Amato down to Dinner Finance Chairman Sal Catucci), conservative patriarch William F. Buckley strode to the lectern and began reflecting, in his usual semi-coherent style on the party's four-decades-long history.

At least that summarizes the first minute or so of Buckley's remarks. After that, Buckley dropped the historiography in favor of an extended needling of the party's likely nominee for governor--incumbent George Pataki--next to whom he'd been seated for most of the evening. On and on Buckley droned, reaching back to Pataki's refusal, while an undergrad at Yale, to endorse a Buckley-sponsored resolution against civil rights at the university's political union, fast-forwarding to the governor's promiscuous spending habits, and culminating with National Review's recent observation that "the only abortion law George Pataki would ever oppose was one that threatened the rights of gays and lesbians."

No one imagined it would come to this. When George Pataki first ran for governor in 1994, he sounded like a conservative's dream come true. Embracing the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Pataki edged out thenGovernor Mario Cuomo thanks to some 300,000 additional votes he picked up on the Conservative Party line. (Candidates for local and statewide office in New York can, and often do, run as the nominees of more than one party.) Throughout the campaign, Pataki railed against the "failed liberal policies" of the Cuomo era and ran commercials that concluded with the words, "Mario Cuomo: Too liberal for too long." He promised to slash government spending, to cut income taxes by an unheard-of 25 percent, to force people on welfare to work, and to pass the death-penalty legislation Cuomo had vetoed each of the previous twelve years.

But since taking office, the conservatism Pataki espoused in 1994 has become less and less politically tenable. Back then--before Newt Gingrich made the GOP seem radical and Dick Morris made the Democrats seem moderate--New York state had 1.3 million more registered Democrats than Republicans. Today that margin stands at nearly two million. Perhaps more important still, the Republican machines that once dominated Long Island politics have collapsed, leaving the party with almost no infrastructure downstate. For Republican candidates, the results have been catastrophic: Since 1998 Pataki and his lieutenant governor, Mary Donohue, are the only Republicans to have won a statewide election.

And yet even in this context, conservatives are amazed at the extent of the governor's reinvention. "What people are surprised at is not that he moved to the center," says Tom Carroll, a former Pataki aide who now heads the conservative advocacy group Change-NY, "but that he kept going." As early as 1998, conservatives began complaining that Pataki's budgets were more lavish, in inflation-adjusted terms, than Cuomo's, and that near-double-digit spending increases were strangling economic growth. Since then, the state budget has only grown more generous. In the last few years Pataki has signed off on large increases in education spending, a costly prescription-drug program, and vast construction projects at the state's universities. And to pay for these outlays, he's had to increase revenue. Though Pataki claims to have cut taxes some 58 times as governor, stealth tax increases elsewhere in the budget--such as those on tobacco--and rising local taxes on everything from property to cell-phone use, have offset many of the more recent cuts.

Pataki has repositioned himself on social issues as well. Though never a devout culture warrior, Pataki won over social conservatives in 1994 with his strong support of the death penalty and welfare reform. But with those two issues now off the table--Pataki reinstituted the death penalty in 1995 and President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996--the governor's social agenda has become decidedly left of center. Last year he successfully lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency for an extremely costly dredging of the Hudson River, which environmentalists claim is contaminated with toxic PCBs. (Many conservatives dispute the need for dredging.) In the months before, he'd spoken out in favor of gay rights; fought for sweeping gun-control legislation; personally protested the military's bombing tests in Vieques, Puerto Rico; and formally proposed repealing the strict Rockefeller-era drug laws--the primary conservative legacy of the state's notoriously liberal Republican governor. Recently Pataki aides have begun joking to reporters that he could probably win the Democratic nomination for governor. But with possible Democratic nominee Andrew Cuomo angling to run as a fiscal moderate, that's not an entirely implausible suggestion.

Pataki, in fact, represents a kind of experiment in whether it's possible for a conservative to win in the Northeast. Between 1993 and 1994--when he along with Christine Todd Whitman, Tom Ridge, and John Rowland swept to victory in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut--the answer appeared to be yes. And that answer fueled the GOP's hopes of becoming America's majority party. At various points during the '90s Pataki, Ridge, and Whitman all figured prominently into parlor games about likely Republican vice presidential, or even presidential, candidates. But less than five years later Whitman is a pariah in the GOP, Rowland faces a fiscal crisis largely of his own creation, and Pataki is practically running to the left of his Democratic opponents. Even Ridge, the most conservative of the bunch, was publicly vetoed for the GOP vice presidential nomination in 2000 because he wasn't unambiguously antiabortion. Republicans still survive in the increasingly Democratic Northeast, but they're doing so by abandoning wholesale the principles that animate the GOP in the rest of the country. So while Pataki's peculiar reelection may not kill hopes of a Republican majority, it does show that the party will have to sacrifice any semblance of ideological coherence in order to achieve it.

Though there is some debate as to whether the early, Reaganesque George Pataki was motivated primarily by ideology or by political expedience, he gave conservatives little cause to complain during his days as a legislator. In his eight years in the state Assembly, Pataki was one of four young legislators--including future Republican Representative Bill Paxon, future Assembly Republican Leader John Faso, and future New York state regulatory czar Robert King--who served as ideological counterweights to the free-spending habits of Democrats and liberal Republicans. As Carroll recalls fondly, "These four people on a rotating basis were kind of the loyal opposition.... Other people were conservative, but those were the four firebrands."

Pataki was intent on playing this same role when he entered the state Senate in 1993. The problem was that the GOP held the majority there; and few Republicans had ever resisted the various carrots and sticks Majority Leader Ralph Marino employed to win support for Cuomo's bloated budgets. That is, until Pataki showed up. Citing his philosophical objection to the 1993 budget's tax increases, the freshman became one of the first Senate Republicans in almost 20 years to vote against the annual budget deal. "It was extremely courageous for him to vote against the budget," says State Senator Michael Nozzolio, who served with Pataki in the Assembly and entered the Senate with him in 1993. "The pressure from the majority leader was extreme."

Courageous or not, Pataki's vote was exquisitely calculated. As King told The New York Times during the 1994 campaign, "We talked repeatedly about what it would take to run for governor.... The first thing was to win a seat in the Senate and vote against the budget. Our joke was that after you ... were dispossessed of your office, you could hold your first press conference out in the hall of the Capitol saying, `Now I'm going to run for governor because things have to be done differently here.'"

During his first few years as governor, Pataki remained true to his conservative pedigree. He quickly proposed, and signed into law, the long-abandoned death-penalty measure. His first budget plan called for $1.9 billion worth of cuts in Medicaid and welfare spending, which would be used to help narrow the $4 billion-plus deficit he inherited from Cuomo and to pay for the four-year, $14 billion income tax cut he'd promised on the campaign trail. And while the final spending numbers in his first budget drifted higher than he'd originally intended, and the tax cut ended up at roughly half its original amount, Pataki won high marks for his determination. The following year, when the governor followed through with $2 billion in tax cuts and reduced state spending again (though the overall budget increased slightly once federal subsidies were included), conservatives became downright dreamy-eyed. "We were very happy with the governor," remembers Mike Long, the Conservative Party's influential state chairman.

But as much as any legislative initiative, what truly vaulted Pataki into the conservative firmament was a 1995 speech he gave at The Heritage Foundation entitled, "Federalism on the Hudson: The Empire State Strikes Back." "Our opponents believed in control and regulation and redistribution of wealth by government elites," the governor told the Heritage faithful. "We believed in individual freedom and personal responsibility and the unbounded riches only a free and creative people can create." By the time Pataki had finished, the audience could have been forgiven for thinking that Reagan himself had appeared before them in the form of a lanky Hungarian from Peekskill. "It was more Reagan than Reagan," crows Carroll.

And then things started to change. By late 1996 the buoyant economy was fattening state coffers faster than even the most optimistic forecasters had expected, making it possible to cut taxes, increase spending, and still run a surplus. Meanwhile, the combination of a rising economic tide and aggressive law enforcement was helping to depress crime, while welfare reform at the state and national levels was sending masses of people off the rolls for the first time in a generation. The frustrations that had swept conservatives into office throughout the Northeast were suddenly evaporating.

This put Republicans in a bind. Those who remained in office found it increasingly difficult to remain true to their principles. In neighboring Connecticut, for example, Republican Governor John Rowland--who in his 1994 campaign vowed to repeal the state income tax--has spent the last few years championing large spending increases for education, prescription drugs, urban renewal, job training, and care for the mentally ill. Meanwhile, those who left--administration hires like Whitman and Ridge--have either been succeeded by Democrats (Jim McGreevey in New Jersey) or by candidates facing uphill battles this fall (Republican gubernatorial nominee Mike Fisher in Pennsylvania). Only in Massachusetts are Republicans likely to nominate a candidate, Winter Olympics impresario Mitt Romney, who both fits the national party ideologically and stands a reasonable chance of winning. But even Romney is far from a sure thing. Now that the luster of his Olympic success is wearing off, the field of Democrats is digging into what was once a double-digit lead. One recent poll has the Democratic front-runner leading Romney by five points in a head-to-head matchup.

But nowhere has this regional shift leftward been starker than in New York. For the last half-century, New York politics have adhered to a cycle of liberal entrenchment, followed by liberal overreach and then conservative reaction, and ending with complacency. In the 1960s liberal Republican icons like Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Jacob Javits, and New York City Mayor John Lindsay dominated the political landscape, presiding over vast expansions of the welfare state as well as increases in crime and urban blight. By 1970 frustration at these excesses had grown so great that the Conservative Party candidate, James Buckley, garnered more than 2 million votes en route to victory in a three-way race for the U.S. Senate. Then in 1980 a little-known Hempstead, Long Island, town executive by the name of Alfonse D'Amato toppled Javits in the Republican primary. D'Amato hammered away relentlessly at the dozens of liberal votes the incumbent had cast over the years--among them votes against the b-1 bomber, and in favor of an equal rights amendment, federal abortion funding, and defense spending cuts. It worked brilliantly. D'Amato's Reaganite platform not only won him the primary, but the general election as well.

The problem is that once the excesses of the '60s and '70s were curbed, New York voters, who are by and large moderate to liberal, began to lose their appetite for conservatism. Long recalls, "Before we elected Jim Buckley our clubhouses were full. We elected Jim Buckley, and it's almost like everyone went back to sleep." In 1976 Buckley lost his Senate seat to Daniel Patrick Moynihan after a single term. And though D'Amato comfortably won reelection in 1986, he did so against an incredibly weak Democratic opponent, Mark Green--and only after spending his first term directing unprecedented amounts of pork to his constituents.

Most Empire State conservatives appreciate this. "You have to be cognizant of the fact that there are two million more Democrats than Republicans in New York," concedes State Senator Serphin Maltese, a former head of the Conservative Party who now identifies as a Republican. What many don't understand is how Pataki went from being conservative to being downright liberal. "I think his political people pushed him too far, which has created this image problem now," says Long.

But Pataki's transformation reflects a key--and, for the national GOP, disturbing--reality about New York politics: It's easier to win statewide as a liberal Republican than as a moderate one. The reason has to do with the state's unique demographic and geographic features. According to the standard heuristic, New York is really three separate states. Upstate is a swath of traditional heartland--skeptical of government and taxes, culturally conservative. The relatively affluent New York City suburbs, like Long Island and Westchester County, are not anti-government in principle but anti-government when the government appears to be serving people other than them (and those other people are often conceived in racial terms). And, of course, the city is the city--dominated by affluent liberals and the left-wing poor. The practical effect is that in periods of liberal overreach, a conservative Republican can patch together a coalition of upstaters and suburbanites with an anti-"tax and spending" message. But as Carroll points out, the second you take your first step leftward, you begin to depress the large upstate turnout necessary to offset huge losses in the city. If you then move further left to compensate for those losses with gains in the city, you're suddenly caught in a vicious cycle. The further left you move, the greater your defections upstate. And the greater your defections upstate, the further to the left you have to move. Pretty soon you're, well, George Pataki.

In fact, Pataki's experience conforms remarkably well to this model. In 1994 he not only won nearly 60 percent of the upstate vote, but he rode a turnout as high as 85 percent in much of the region. Along the way, Pataki benefited both from resentment at the expansion of government during the Cuomo years, and from the specific perception that state spending favored the city while shortchanging the rest of the state. Indeed, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's late-October endorsement of Cuomo seemed to bear this perception out. A few days after the endorsement, Giuliani released a budget that stuck the state with the tab for more than $100 million in social spending. Pataki responded by barnstorming upstate and the suburbs, condemning what he described as an insidious "deal." "Mario Cuomo has been using taxpayer money to save his job and buy votes," Pataki charged. In the days following the endorsement, most polls showed support for Cuomo surging. But during the campaign's final week, Pataki's ability to exploit the upstate/ downstate division helped win him the election.

Unfortunately for Pataki, two factors have undermined the upstate-suburban coalition that carried him to victory in 1994. First, the decline in crime and welfare combined with gross mismanagement at the local level have undone the GOP's stranglehold over the suburbs. For years Nassau County--D'Amato's base--was widely regarded as the most powerful Republican machine in the country--and perhaps the most powerful political machine of any kind outside Chicago. But in 1999 the county legislature fell into Democratic hands amid one of the worst local fiscal crises in history. Second, the long-suffering upstate region continued to resist the upward economic trends of the '90s and as a result has suffered a steady out-migration--almost half a percent per year in the late '90s. Much of the migration, moreover, has occurred among the better-educated people whose frustration with overtaxation and overregulation helped elect Pataki in 1994. "When you look at the population upstate ... the only place you see any positive change is if someone puts a jail there," laments local political historian Jim Chapin. And as the economically marginal comprise a larger and larger proportion of the region, upstate has actually become more receptive to liberal, Democratic appeals. (Witness the successes of Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who won 47 percent and 45 percent of the upstate vote in their 2000 and 1998 U.S. Senate campaigns, respectively.) All of which is to say that when Pataki, who had already moderated his tone somewhat, looked at his 1998 reelection returns and saw he'd won only 54 percent of the vote against an incredibly weak candidate, the implication was clear: reinvent himself as a liberal or be content with two terms as governor.

Pataki's leftward thrust is really two strategies in one. The first is to cut deals with traditionally Democratic unions, whose leaders will endorse--and whose members will vote for--whichever politician satisfies their demands for higher wages and benefits. Pataki and the state have paid handsomely--hence the escalating state budgets of the last few years.

To conservatives, the most galling example of this strategy is the accommodation Pataki recently reached with the powerful New York City hospital workers' union leader, Dennis Rivera. (At the Conservative Party dinner, Buckley accused Pataki of making the state "a wholly owned subsidiary" of Rivera's union.) It would be a gross understatement to say that Rivera--whose past political activity has included collaborating with Al Sharpton to back the mayoral candidacy of Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and supporting liberal bogeymen like Jerry Brown and Jesse Jackson--is an unlikely ally for a onetime Reaganite like Pataki. And yet two months after Pataki came through with $1.8 billion in pay increases for his local 1199, Rivera threw his notoriously disciplined 200,000-member union behind the governor's campaign. "I'm a Democrat," Rivera said after announcing his endorsement in March. "On the other hand, I have to recognize that Governor Pataki has been incredibly helpful to the health care union."

And already the Rivera deal has been incredibly helpful to Pataki. In negotiating it, Pataki aides got to know Rivera adviser Greg Tarpinian, a longtime labor operative and hitherto militant lefty. Once the agreement with the hospital workers was consummated, Tarpinian agreed to come aboard the Pataki campaign as a paid labor consultant. He's been paying dividends ever since. Not long after Rivera's endorsement in March, the president of the Uniformed Sanitation Men's Association coughed up an endorsement of his own. Since then, the Teamsters have followed suit; traditionally hard-core Democratic unions like the textile workers and the United Federation of Teachers are expected to fall in line in the coming months. Tarpinian assured me recently that he has "virtually nothing to do with" the recent endorsements. ("My role is to advise the campaign on how to best utilize labor support," he says.) But labor insiders sense his involvement in the deals, which, all told, could cost the state tens of millions of dollars in new contracts.

The second dimension of Pataki's strategy is to appeal to liberal New York City voters by recasting himself as a social progressive. To this end, Pataki has in the last several months championed gun control, gay rights, and an end to bombing at Vieques. But even with these high-profile liberal concessions, Pataki aides worry about registered Democrats who, as Tarpinian puts it, "feel uncomfortable voting Republican but want to vote for the governor." So in addition to Pataki's liberal stands, there is a more subtle, procedural dimension to the strategy: His aides are positioning him to win the New York Independence Party nomination, which would allow Democrats to vote for the governor without technically voting for a Republican.

That nomination could be a poisoned chalice, however. New York's Independence Party is a freakish amalgam that includes disaffected upstate conservatives and militant black leftists from New York City, the latter of whom are led by former fringe presidential candidate Lenora Fulani, who is accused of having made anti-Semitic comments in the past (see "Coming Soon to a Presidential Campaign Near You," by David Grann, TNR, December 13, 1999). Given Fulani's post-9/11 comments blaming the terrorist attacks on "how America has positioned itself in the world," the nomination could do Pataki more harm than good. But perhaps the greater concern is that, having aggressively pursued the nomination, Pataki could lose it to wealthy Rochester businessman and party founder Tom Golisano. According to one adviser, Golisano may spend a whopping $75 million on his campaign. And with his fiscal-conservative message, he could exploit the anti-Pataki sentiment that's been brewing within state's right wing--potentially splitting the Republican vote enough to hand the race to Andrew Cuomo or the other Democratic contender, State Comptroller Carl McCall.

But while possible, such a scenario is remote. Almost every week brings the governor another high-profile endorsement. Pataki's approval rating stands at 70 percent, and polls show him leading both McCall and Cuomo by some 30 points. For the national GOP, the real conundrum isn't a Pataki loss--which might serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of betraying conservative principle; it's a Pataki win--which could convince a whole breed of Northeastern Republicans that the path to continued survival is old-fashioned liberalism.

Over the next decade the growing political presence of Hispanics, and the increasingly Democratic voting habits of educated suburbanites, may well conspire to put the Sunbelt more and more in play for Democrats. Republicans could find themselves on the wrong side of these long-term demographic trends unless they find offsetting ways to become competitive in the Northeast and West Coast. In 1994 Pataki seemed to be doing just that, and his party was jubilant. Today he's doing it again--but this time national Republicans can't help wondering whether it's coming at their expense.

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The answer is yes a conservative can win. Now all we have to do is find one.

Cause these nitwits are all RINO's.

Some of this is pretty on the mark. On the other hand, there appears to be an inherant contradiction in regards to Upstate. On one hand, he describes it as the last bastion of conservatism in the state, on the other, he describes it as receptive to liberals like the Hildebeast. Personally, I remain disappointed in Pataki, but I also think that NY, like Massachusetts is basically too liberal to allow a conservative to hold statewide office for very long. Look at Dennis Vacco. One term as AG and then out.

Look at Dennis Vacco. One term as AG and then out.

I think one of the main reasons Vacco lost was very bad publicity he received when he fired so many mid-level Assistant Attorney Generals (those that do the Office's heavy lifting) and replaced them with the newly-graduated-from-law-school sons and daughters of contributers. The kids didn't know what they were doing and cases were being thrown out left and right for statute of limitations and other missed deadline reasons. Judges were holding the Office in contempt.

(I represented a client in a case where the young and new Assistant Attorney General offered me a really good plea deal on a case. The problem was, it was the last day the Office had to indict the guy. I thanked the kid very much for his generous offer and politely turned it down. When the case was called, the judge dismissed it on speedy trial grounds.)

Another thing I've noticed:

Even though many upstaters are culturally conservative and consider themselves republicans, or even conservative republicans, they still want a lot of government services (pork, if you will).

You have the farmers who claim to want Washington out of their hair, but still look for subsidy checks, the Senior Citizens looking for their social security handouts and the various folks who grew up with high paying unionized government jobs at army bases, state mental hospitals, etc., looking for new state jobs. Not to mention various grants for tourism along the canal, etc.

When even the republicans want help from "big government," is it any surprise the most successful republican in over 30 years is a left of center RINO type?

Folks by and large get the government they vote for.

For all intents and purposes, New York is now politically indistinguishable from Massachusetts.

My proof? One word - Hillary!

Victoria - when did the people up there go sour?

How are trends with us?
NY is becomeing
More dependent on Government and the Non-profit sector
Increasingly socially liberal as conservative Catholics move out
and Increasingly minority.

I am active in NY Republican and Conservative Politics. I see no future here.

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