The New Republic

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.; "I
think his political people pushed him too far..."

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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