New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox and his inner circle are giving themselves high-fives today because they believe their political acumen is responsible for the GOP taking back House seats and perhaps regaining majority control of the state Senate.
Yet the broken state Republican establishment had little to do with yesterday’s victories — in fact, it was a hindrance.
For years, the GOP’s statewide ballot-box appeal has been declining thanks to Cox, his two inept predecessors, Sandy Treadwell and Joe Mondello, and the party’s last statewide elected official, Gov. George Pataki.
The trend started in the mid-1990s, when Pataki’s political consultants convinced him that the best approach to winning elections was to abandon conservative principles, become Democratic-lite on fiscal and social issues and buy off government-employee and health-care unions with unsustainable wage and benefit deals.
The pandering may have worked for Pataki (against weak opponents) but has seen New York’s Republicans, from 1998 to 2008, lose the office of governor, attorney general, a US Senate seat and nine House seats, plus 12 assemblymen and the party’s 42-year hold on the state Senate.
Because the Pataki-era GOP lost its way and deliberately failed to nurture a new generation of viable candidates, state-party conventions in recent years designated three wannabes who were previously rejected by the voters and made their livings feeding off the government trough as lobbyists.
In 2006, the convention tapped John Faso, the loser in the 2002 comptroller’s race, who went on to receive only 29 percent of the vote in his gubernatorial run. This year, the convention supported Rick Lazio, the 2000 US Senate loser to Hillary Clinton, for governor, and Bruce Blakeman, who lost the 1998 comptroller’s race to Carl McCall and was booted in 1999 from his Nassau County Legislature seat for supporting a 19 percent property-tax hike, for the Senate seat held by Kirsten Gillibrand. Lazio was creamed by insurgent Carl Paladino in the primary, while Blakeman came in last among three primary candidates, garnering only 20 percent of the vote.
In the 2010 election cycle, the GOP had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take back the state government, thanks to voter hostility toward incumbents. The electorate from Buffalo to Montauk was disgusted with epidemic fiscal mismanagement, oppressive taxes, arrogance, incompetence and rampant corruption in their Democratic-controlled state and local governments.
New Yorkers were angry because their children and grandchildren have had to leave to find greener economic pastures elsewhere. They were angry that high taxes have destroyed their local economies and residential-property values.
This rage should have boded well for the Republican Party — but the hamstrung, impotent, enfeebled GOP old guard failed to answer the voters’ cries for help. As a result, desperate rank-and-file Republicans in the September primary chose the only anti-establishment candidate, Paladino — a political buffoon whose antics hurt the entire state ticket yesterday.
Yesterday’s smattering of GOP victories had nothing to do with the party leadership. Republicans had just hit bottom — they hold so few elected offices in New York that in this Tea Party, “Don’t tread on me” political environment they were bound to win a few races.
To restore the party’s credibility with the voters so it can again become a viable political force in the state, Ed Cox and longtime county bosses like Nassau’s Joe Mondello should resign and turn the party over to younger, energetic people who are more interested in championing conservative fiscal and economic principles than in rewarding cronies and placating lobbyists and contractors. They should also invite Tea Party activists to join the GOP’s ranks and build a base-vote-driven, grass-roots party structure.
If New York Republicans don’t embrace these suggestions, they’ll become a minor party — and, at best, win statewide in once-a-generation wave elections.
George J. Marlin is the author of “Squan dered Opportunities: New York’s Pataki Years.”