"Right now, I am a candidate for United State Senate," Pirro declared after the meeting, with all the confidence of someone asking to be drafted into another race. (PirroforAg.com directs visitors to her Senate campaign website. Hmm.) In a pink suit jacket and knee-high skirt, facing a gaggle of well-bundled reporters on a midtown street, Jeanine even looked like someone who needed shelter from the storm.
Conservatives will be glad to get rid of Pirro and the "broad blue stripes on social issues" she loves touting. Her understudy is former Yonkers mayor John Spencer. Ever hear of him? Didn't think so. Conservatives like him, and the last Republican to run statewide without Conservative Party support was Howard Mills. Remember him? Then again, one of the last guys to run statewide with Conservative Party support was Rick Lazio. Seen him lately? (You might have, by the way. He's considering a run for state attorney general, the office Bruno and others would like to see Pirro to drop out of her Senate campaign to run for. Who knows? A battle between Hillary victims could be fun.)
Pirro's Senate run isn't the only fight pitting Pataki against Bruno and moderates against conservatives in the Grand Old Party. Pataki's handpicked chairman of the state party wants to endorse a GOP gubernatorial candidate (preferably former Massachusetts governor William Weld) by December 12. Bruno and conservatives prefer Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano. Remember him? The two-time Independence Party gubernatorial candidate spent more than $100 million in past races bashing Pataki, Bruno and everyone else in Albany. Now that's compassionate.
In the meantime, three others are promising to run in what's looking to be a crowded GOP primary, which means a lot of Republicans beating up Republicans before the "winner" gets the full Freddy treatment. U-na-tee.
And that's not even mentioning the two unnamed plutocrats Bruno claimed were seriously considering running, and whose existence have been called into question by pretty much everyone except Bruno.
Given that all these candidates are likely losers, you might wonder if all this amounts to a fight between the outgoing governor, famous for spending as little time as possible in Albany (and who can blame him?) and Bruno, the party's presumptive leader once Pataki is gone—especially if the Republican candidates get smashed, as expected, in the coming statewide races.
But to a Grand Old Party looking older and less grand, the difference between likely losers is monumental. The party isn't running to win. It's running to survive.
All state lawmakers are up for election next year, including the four Republicans who give the GOP its paper-thin majority in the State Senate, its last haven of statewide power. Republicans are outnumbered in the State Assembly two to one. No gubernatorial candidate is polling at half of Eliot Spitzer's numbers right now. Throw in a Hillary Clinton re-election and you have a Democratic tsunami. If the governor's seat and control of the state senate go to Democrats, they'll have control over the legislature and the executive chambers—just in time for the 2010 redistricting. It's not hard to imagine newly gerrymandered districts that ensure a generation of uninterrupted Democratic control. Democratic Congressman Joseph Crowley is already promising revenge for Texas.
And given that minority legislators in New York are little more than decorative ornaments with good paychecks and barely more patronage to pass out than your over-generous grandparents, losing the Senate would knock Republicans out of the game entirely.
The fights about Pirro and Weld are, in essence, less about who runs than about who now runs the party, Pataki or Bruno, two aging fighters who were once close allies.
Think Brunoback Mountain.
Two guys, Republican guys, in the lonely Democratic terrain of New York. No place bluer. No two closer. Two weeks after Pataki became governor in 1994, another vote was taking place to put Bruno in charge of the Senate. The majority leader at the time, Ralph Marino, hadn't backed Pataki. Bruno had. While Marino was visiting his mother in Rochester for Thanksgiving, Pataki and Bruno raided the stable of Republican senators and whipped up a coup to oust Marino. Marino tried lining up supporters and calling in favors. According to the Associated Press, "Eventually, Marino's cell phone battery went dead. Bruno went right on calling."
"The things he believes and talks about are the things I've been talking about for years and years," Bruno said of Pataki in a 1994 New York Times article entitled "Soul Mate for Pataki" that ran the day he became majority leader.
"In the earlier years in the Pataki administration, the Senate and Senator Bruno were closely aligned with the governor," said New York Public Research Interest Group's Albany point man, Blaire Horner, whose cell phone was working fine. "Then over time, they drifted apart. I think to some extent it's due to institutional tension that exists between any executive and any legislator." Executive want to cut taxes, legislators want to bring home the bacon.
But now Pataki is about to leave the warm embrace of the 76-year-old Bruno. At 50 years young, Pataki still has time to sow his wild oats in Ohio, Iowa and other fertile states to see if he can knock the electorate up to at least the tune of a vice-presidential nomination. In politics, there is such a thing as half-pregnant.
"The governor is moving back to the right as he tries to position himself nationally, and Bruno has to worry more about his members getting re-elected," said Horner. "He doesn't want to alienate the members, in particular, and other special interests."
Since Pataki began spending more time on the road, whom might a lonely, desperate Senate Majority Leader turn to for a little attention? How about the nice, quiet boy (who works) next door, Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Together, they put the kibosh on Mike Bloomberg's stadium plans and even passed the 2003 state budget over Pataki's veto.
"The governor didn't go to war over those vetoes, so how much he really wanted the vetoes overridden, who knows," said Horner. "It's like 15-dimensional chess up here. This is a place that Machiavelli would feel right at home. You never really know how much of it is fake, how much of it is real. It's hard to know." Role playing.
"The governor has an image to maintain of a tight-fisted fiscal conservative. Even if it's not necessarily real, that's the way he wants to position himself."
Pataki has tried polishing his image at Bruno's expense, most recently when Pataki furrowed his Jimmy Stewart smirk and warned that a Bruno-Silver bill to control more of the budgetary process "is the most dangerous proposal, I believe, in over 50 years." No love there.
But embers of their honeymoon smoldered for years, with traces of it as late as this January, when Pataki gushed in his State of the State address:
"After ten years, none of us have changed a bit—we all look exactly the same, except maybe for Joe Bruno, who somehow manages to look even younger than he did back then."
Still crazy after all these years. So what better way to send off a soul mate then to give him the image he needs for a presidential bid.
Could these fights over Pirro and the gubernatorial candidates really be a well-orchestrated, manufactured way to spark interest and hope in races Republicans aren't expected to win anyway? How's that for a third-act twist, or for a second honeymoon?
"A couple of months ago everybody said the Republican Party was really in a malaise, and there wasn't much happening," noted Chairman of the King's County Conservative Party Jerry Kassar. All the fights "certainly have brought a lot of interest. For a party that so many people were saying was dead, it's not dead. They've brought a lot of interest to this process. I mean, you're writing about it, and you're not the only one. I'm not suggesting there was some grand plan," Kassar tried assuring me, "but there definitely is a benefit to it."
