Sunday’s New York Times magazine features an interview with disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner, which Weiner granted in a bid to gauge if the public is ready to accept him back in public life.
The Weiner piece comes in the wake of the arrest of state Sen. Malcolm Smith for trying to buy his way onto the Republican mayoral primary ballot. His indictment left many asking, “Why is New York so corrupt?” The answer may lie in the careers of people like Weiner and Smith.
Both the ex-congressman from Queens and the state senator are part of an expansive and expensive political culture which affords them a lifelong job as a New York politico, with virtually no experience doing anything else.
It’s no wonder that many elected officials seem willing to do just about anything, like Smith, to preserve and advance their careers — while others, like Weiner, grow arrogant, egotistical and out of touch with everyday norms after spending years in the New York political bubble.
It’s not like that everywhere else, believe it or not.
Consider Smith: After graduating from college with a business degree, he looked at a real-estate career. In New York City, real estate is a heavily politicized, often subsidized enterprise — which may be why, while still in his 20s, Smith got a job as an aide to City Councilman Archie Spigner.
Smith quickly got the political bug and began running for office at the tender age of 30. Though he failed in three bids to get elected to the City Council and Legislature, he advanced his career, serving as an aide to Rep. Floyd Flake and as an appointee in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development. He also founded a real-estate nonprofit which built homes on public land, and became president of a housing-education group that received extensive funding from government.
In 2000, Smith won a special election for state Senate against former Assemblyman Andrew Jenkins, who was trying a comeback after serving a year in jail for money laundering. That election began Smith’s controversial 12-year Senate run, where rumors of investigations of Smith have been so common that in a September 2012 newspaper article he declared, “People think that I’m a crook and a thief, and I’m absolutely not.”
Weiner similarly seemed headed for a lifetime political gig until he self-destructed. Right after graduating from SUNY-Plattsburgh, he took a job in the office of then-Rep. Chuck Schumer. At 27, he won a City Council seat in a controversial election in which his campaign blanketed his district with anonymous leaflets tinged with racial overtones in the wake of the Crown Heights riots. He later admitted he was the source of the pamphlets.
Some seven years later, Weiner leapt to Congress, winning an election to succeed his mentor, Schumer (who ran for his first office at age 25).
Weiner hasn’t held a real job since resigning his seat in the wake of the 2011 outcry over his Tweeting suggestive photos to female admirers. As some press reports made clear, Weiner desperately tried to hold onto his seat in part because he was qualified to do nothing else.
Weiner and Smith have crafted their careers in a New York political system that is among the nation’s most far-reaching and costly.
The Legislature is one of only five full-time state bodies. (Some claim it’s not full-time, because lawmakers can hold outside jobs — but the real test is how often it meets. Texas’, for one, meets only every other year.) New York legislators’ pay, starting at $79,000 a year but going as high as $121,000 when allowances for committee appointments are figured in, is third-highest in the nation.
The entire machinery of the Legislature, including an enormous staff which serves as a breeding ground for future pols, makes it among the most expensive. It spends about $1 million per representative, or about three times the national average. By contrast, the nation’s second-largest state, Texas, is governed by a part-time legislature whose member base pay is $7,200 per year.
It’s the same elsewhere in the state. The City Council, with 51 members, is enormous relative to other big cities. Los Angeles, with 47 percent of New York’s population, has just 15 council members.
And nothing in the performance of the Empire State’s legislative bodies suggests that taxpayers get their money’s worth. In a recent poll, 65 percent of respondents disapproved of the job the Legislature is doing.
It’s even worse in California, where the nation’s most expensive state legislature garners a 22 percent approval rating. A voter initiative is now under way to convert California back to a part-time legislature.
Maybe it’s time for a downsizing of New York’s elected and appointed bodies, as well as the numerous government-financed nonprofits that provide careers for politically connected citizens.
At the very least, taxpayers would get government at lower prices. And maybe, New York would shake up its political culture enough to force the likes of Anthony Weiner and Malcolm Smith to figure out how to earn a living first before trying to govern the rest of us.
Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.