ALBANY – Having resigned as Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno calls former Gov. Eliot Spitzer “demented” and contends Gov. Paterson will be “very difficult” to defeat.
Bruno, 79, the almost always provocative and personally engaging leader of the Senate for 12 ½ years and a lawmaker first elected in 1976, resigned as majority leader last month and left the Senate entirely Friday at midnight.
He talked at length with The Post about his long career.
Post: What is it like on your first day out of office?
Bruno: I was up until after midnight, sort of like you do on New Year’s Eve, watching the clock as I went from being a senator for 32 years to being a former senator. I was by myself, nostalgic, and it was a little sad, but there was satisfaction too.
I got to sleep at around 1:30 and got up at 6 this morning, took a long walk with the dog. I have two of my kids here. We’re mucking the [horse] stalls and we’ve got a bunch of fence posts to install.
Post: There are widespread rumors you decided to resign because of the ongoing federal probe of your outside business interests, perhaps as part of a deal to escape prosecution.
Bruno: There is no deal. There was never talk of a deal. I’ve been accused of nothing and I expect to be accused of nothing. They’ve had 2 ½ years touching every piece of paper that I’ve ever touched and I am accused of nothing.
Post: State government is regularly described as dysfunctional and dominated by a culture of corruption. What do you say about that?
Bruno: The No. 1 problem is that members [legislators] run every two years – the entire Legislature. That’s what’s wrong. They don’t have a chance to govern. I’d like to see, minimally, four-year terms.
Think about it. As soon as a person is elected, they’re running for their next election and any opponents are taking them on and sniping. So what do you do? You have to defer to surviving and that’s where the vested-interest groups come in.
Post: Whom do you prefer as the Republican candidate for governor in 2010, Mayor Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani?
Bruno: You got a year and a half, two years for people to become viable. Personally, I think there are a lot of people who are going to become viable in a year or two.
And frankly, David Paterson is going to be very, very difficult [to defeat] if he keeps going in his bipartisan way, getting results.
Post: You were a lawmaker during the tenures of five governors. Who was the worst?
Bruno: Without a second’s hesitation, it was Eliot Spitzer. The man was demented. I knew it the first couple of meetings I had with him. Here you are with a man who was truly unbalanced and ruining some of the greatest businesses in the state when he was attorney general. He headed this state into such a downward spiral that it is just fortunate that we have any balance here at all.
Post: The New York GOP has collapsed in recent years. What happened?
Bruno: The Republican Party was not a focus of the previous [Pataki] administration. You had nobody internally concentrating on grass-roots party building. The chief executive is really the head of the party and has to be partnered and supportive.
Post: Any final words for the people of New York?
Bruno: [Sighing] You know, I’ve had some great, great rewards being in public service. And I’ve had some disappointments. And I’ve had some heartaches. But all in all I wouldn’t trade my experience for the world.