This week's syndicated column
Pataki tantalizes ‘long time’ listeners

Gov. George E. Pataki delivered his State of the State message to a joint session of the state Senate and Assembly. The message contained a lot of general information but little in the way of specifics.
What I found most interesting in the very long and almost hypnotic offering, given in the bland Pataki style, was a tantalizing question/joke in the beginning of the effort. The governor asked if everyone was comfortable and then suggested that it would be good if they were because he might be “here for a long time.” Naturally, the Republicans applauded as one and the Democrats looked bewildered. Pataki was, of course, having a little fun and as intended, the question got political tongues wagging.
The crack was purposely ambiguous. It could have meant that the speech was going to be long and tedious, which it certainly was. Or, it might have been a signal that he was going to run for a fourth term, something I have been suggesting all along, whether he knows it now or not.

It well may be that Pataki has not decided which course of action to take. Many folks think the governor wants to be president and that dream can only be realized if he becomes a cabinet member and runs for president from that perch. If he gets to Washington, the theory goes, he may turn really conservative and show all the right wing ideologues that he is the real thing with the right stuff. He won’t have to pussyfoot around, assuring moderates in New York State that he’s not really a right winger like the Bushies in Washington. By the time he’s done, he’ll be a bona fide conservative with all the states that put George Bush in the White House behind him.

On the other hand, these days it is as rare as a hen’s tooth to see a cabinet member become a president. That’s because the folks in the cabinet are as dependent upon a sitting president for orders and direction as the lowest office boy in the Department of Commerce bureaucracy. Tick off the president and you are out of a job. To put it mildly, you are nothing more than a kind of super flunky.
Then too, there is the matter of controlling the huge governmental bureaucracy and all that it means. It means deals for your economic and political friends. It means contracts. It means paying back your friend former Sen. Al D’Amato who helped you get where you are in New York. In other words, the governorship is a lot bigger than Pataki. It represents billions of dollars in “goodies” to the people who put Pataki where he is now and believe me, they do not want to see all of that given away to the likes of Honest Eliot Spitzer or sometime Republican rival Rudolph Giuliani, who has been known to be his own man. If you don’t believe me, just look at what happened when Giuliani was the top federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. The pressure must be intense on Pataki to stay where he is.
Or, Pataki may have been warning people not to consider him a lame duck. We all know that if he says he won’t run again, his chances of doing business with his [already] “runaway” Legislature may be diminished. People suggest that he may not intend to run again but he has to keep folks guessing. It’s that simple.
Even if he does decide to run, there’s a long way between lip and cup. Pataki is responsible for bringing the Republican convention to New York. Since a lot of folks in New York hate George Bush’s guts, we may have quite a spectacle in the city this summer. I was in Miami for the Republican convention in 1972 and I still remember the protests and the tear gas. With hundreds of thousands of people upset about the war in Iraq, things may get ugly. Even if everyone behaves peacefully, the situation may look bad to the millions watching on television. The Democrats, meeting in the Democratic city of Boston, may actually look a lot healthier. If Pataki’s gamble in bringing the convention to New York goes sour, his stock may fall.

Right now the common wisdom is that Pataki will not copy Mario Cuomo and run for a fourth term. On the other hand, commuting by helicopter to Albany and enjoying all the other perks can get very addictive. My bet is that he’ll wake up one morning and decide he has to take the risk. Pataki’s little joke at the beginning of his speech has certainly raised some questions. But as Sigmund Freud may well not have said, “There is no joke.”

- posted by Alan @ 1/22/2004 09:09:00 AM