Speaker Silver Rises With Budget: Analysis

The leaders of New York's Legislature, Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, emerged from a closed-door negotiation in the governor's chamber last week and faced reporters.
    
“Senator, are there any deals?''
    
Silver answered. Smith, to whom the question was addressed, listened. Gov. David Paterson stayed in his office.
    
What had been quietly known for years was clear in a moment: Albany is Silvertown.
    
Silver was a different guy this budget session. For more than a decade as part of New York's notorious three-men-in-a-room negotiations, he was the guy who mostly shrugged and intoned cryptic musings to questions.
    
Inside the meetings where billions of taxpayer dollars are spent and groundbreaking public policy is hatched, though, Silver was the master negotiator who won not by oratory or pounding tables, but by sitting back and folding his arms. He'd wait for those expending all that energy to ask him what he needed to sign on. Even then, Silver was just as likely to not to answer, frustrating governors even more.
    
Now Republican Gov. George Pataki is gone. Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a combative Democratic rival, is gone. Republican Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, Silver's contemporary and most successful adversary, is gone.
    
So Silver, in office 33 years and speaker for 15, faces rookies in Smith and Paterson.
    
“Clearly, the speaker dominated this budget process,'' said Robert B. Ward, deputy director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government research center. “When you had Speaker Silver and Sen. Bruno, you had two leaders with a lot of experience, a lot of internal political security, and a lot of influence. Obviously, that is not true with the new Senate majority.''
    
Silver's wins in the last two weeks include a budget that will increase spending 8.7 percent when Paterson sought large cuts.
 
Silver also led long-sought efforts to dismantle the Rockefeller-era drug laws to send more nonviolent drug dealers and users to treatment instead of prison. He restored much of Paterson's cuts to health care and education and to New York City.
    
“I also think that a lot of what happened in the budget reflects the fact that the advocacy dollars and power are lined up more strongly than ever with the agenda that primarily is the Assembly's,'' Ward said.
    
Paterson, a year in office, defended himself Monday, saying 75 percent of the budget approved last week was in his December budget proposal to the Legislature. But most state budgets are more than 90 percent of what a governor proposes.
    
Yet it would be wrong to accept the breathless commentaries these days about how Silver has just now emerged as the most powerful figure in Albany, or Lord of Albany as a newspaper editorial derisively referred to him. Silver has always been a force and perhaps Albany's most powerful single force, by far, through this decade.
    
“When I was minority leader, you had to fight for anything you may get from him,'' said John Faso, leader of the Assembly Republicans from 1998 to 2002. “As someone who has been there the longest, and one of the longest serving speakers in New York history, he has a wealth of knowledge and a bunch of IOUs that are out there.''
    
Silver's ability to wait out his adversaries won him historic funding gains for his progressive agenda during the later Pataki years, after Pataki was ushered into office to whip big-spending Albany. Silver beat back popular New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once on a proposed stadium on Manhattan's West Side, and again on a traffic congestion pricing plan.
    
“He's extremely frustrating, but you always respected that he was a very skillful and in command,'' said David Catalfamo, Pataki's former communications director. “At the end of the day, you have to have a lot of respect for what he's accomplished and his political acumen, whether you agree with him or not.''
    
But besides Silver's considerable personal skills, Catalfamo said the speaker's time has come. Silver's long-term goal of providing health care to more people and other traditional Democratic planks comes as New York is becoming even more Democratic. He's also able to evolve as needed, such as turning his early adversarial relationship with Bruno into an alliance to override scores of Pataki's vetoes on spending.
    
“I think the speaker is the transcendent political figure in New York at the moment, and has been for a period of time,'' Catalfamo said.
    
And much of the time, Silver has had the same enviable team. Where Silver has widely respected and longtime staffers like Dean Fuleihan who has spent a lifetime as a top fiscal adviser to Albany's most powerful leaders, Paterson is on his third chief of staff just over a year in office.
    
“The speaker has always been powerful,'' said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group. “But his institutional and experience advantage has put him in the driver's seat in the way he wasn't in the past. In the past, the chief tactic was to be the guy who said, `No,' and the deals that had to be worked out had to come to him.
    
“This year, it seems to me, that he really was in charge of crafting the final deals,'' Horner said.
    
Is it good or bad for New York to have an inscrutable lawyer who represents 125,000 people in lower Manhattan calling many of the shots for 19 million New Yorkers from Montauk to Niagara Falls?
    
“It depends on how you view the policies,'' Horner said. “If you are a New Yorker most concerned about the availability of services, it's probably good from your perspective. If you are concerned about taxation rates, then you probably have a different view.''