Having witnessed the anarchy, chaos and lack of leadership that has engulfed the state Capitol during the past month, I have a painful confession to make.
After three decades as a journalist covering state government, if I had to do it all over again, I’d find another job.
I’ve covered Govs. Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson and for New York to wind up like this after 35 years of modern leadership, it’s clear to me that my real job has been to chronicle the devolution — the decay and decline — of New York state.
We’re going backwards, not forwards, and of late we’ve even been falling apart.
The Empire State — once a beacon of progressive state government to the nation — is on the brink of ruin. And it doesn’t look like anything can be done to stop it.
In two words: We’re doomed.
Hapless Gov. Paterson and the street-fighting leaders of the state Senate have, as everyone knows, turned state government into a national laughingstock.
Within the Capitol itself, where knowledge of the disaster is more acute, the assessments are far harsher and more personally painful. They are disbelief, disgust, and even despair.
I’ve had a dozen low- to mid-level staffers — hallway cleaners, messengers, guards, sergeants at arms, researchers, and lawyers — buttonhole me in recent days and, in a hushed voice, make comments such as, “I’m ashamed to work here,” “I’ve given my life for this?” and “I feel like I work for morons.”
The GOP-led Senate coup attempt that began June 8 has paralyzed state government and transformed a Senate once known for a gentility and friendliness rooted in a rural upstate sensibility into a frighteningly unrecognizable doppelganger of the fisticuffs-prone South Korean parliament.
Under the Democratic control that began in January, the Senate’s traditional civility gave way to a crude, rude, nasty and thuggish style that has long associated with late-night New York City community board meetings, or some outer borough Democratic caucuses.
The failed coup attempt has made it worse and the Senate today stands as not just a house divided between the two major parties but as a house divided within one of the major parties as three separate Democratic factions angrily and nastily battle for control.
The most glaring example of the thug-like behavior occurred on the Senate floor Wednesday as several burly, thick-necked men suddenly began flanking the podium in an apparent attempt by Democrats, who claim to control of the chamber, to block Republicans from rushing up.
The move was shocking because the Senate already has several professionally trained and experienced sergeants at arms, many retired state troopers, who do a fine job keeping order.
Several Democratic senators including Pedro Espada of the Bronx, John Sampson of Brooklyn and Malcolm Smith of Queens have also appeared with bullish bodyguards and other “body men” for the first time ever.
One Democratic faction, loyal to Sampson, has begun spying on members of the faction loyal Smith, and even preparing reports on their activities.
Journalists like myself have always been granted free access to the Senate but two weeks ago Democrats sought to bar journalists from the chamber, only backing down in the face of the protests from several angry scribes.
During the long years of Republican control, the all-white GOP “conference” would regularly bemoan its lack of diversity, and make extra efforts to recruit minority Senate candidates and hire minority staff.
During the first five months of this year, with the Senate under the control of its first African-American majority leader, Smith, top Democrats bemoaned the lack of minority Senate staffers.
But instead of trying to recruit new hires, they fired nearly 200 almost exclusively white workers and replaced them with a large number of minority employees, many of whom were seen by their fellow workers to be unskilled at their new jobs.
The move produced severe racial tensions, made worse by the fact that, as a high-level Democratic staffer confided, “We’ve been told to only hire minorities.”
We have an accidental governor widely seen as weak and irrelevant and, in recent days, he’s become a latter-day Chicken Little issuing false warnings of disaster as the June 30 deadline approached for the expiration of mayoral control of city schools.
Even members of his own Democratic Party didn’t take the deadline serious and when it passed, no one could tell the difference.
Paterson has been publicly insulted in recent days by his fellow Democrats in a way no other governor ever was in recorded history, and he’s refused to respond.
We saw the governor do flip-flops right before our eyes on a key issue related to the Senate dispute, confirming the now-common belief that his stands merely mirror the views of the last person he speaks with.
I first came to New York’s magnificent Capitol building in the wake of the state’s fiscal crisis in 1977, when Carey, a World War II battle hero, was still winning plaudits for rescuing the city and state from the fiscal crisis.
The scrappy Carey was considered a national class political figure — as befitted a state that had produced other national class 20th century governors such as Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Al Smith, Tom Dewey, Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller.
Mario Cuomo, whose fame as an intellect and great orator spread nationally, followed Carey.
Republican Pataki promised sweeping reforms but quickly retreated in the face of a resistant Legislature and powerful special interests.
After 12 years of Pataki, New Yorkers yearned for change, which is why Spitzer’s colossal political and moral failures were such a tragedy.
Paterson, Spitzer’s unexpected successor, talked like a reformer when he took office in March 2008, but his collapse as a leader has been so sweeping as to be unlike anything seen in the history of New York. He’s now the least popular governor in the United States.
Is any more proof needed that New York has gone down the drain?
Fredric Dicker is The Post’s state editor.