GOV. Spitzer:
It was just over a year ago that I wrote you with 15 suggestions that, based on my three decades covering state government, I truly believed would help you make this a better state.
You had, after all, won a landslide victory pledging to bring the same high level of accomplishment and energy to the state’s top office that you were credited with bringing to the Office of Attorney General.
Who could have imagined you would fail so badly?
I write you now with new suggestions that I genuinely believe could help improve your effectiveness as you approach the end of your first year as governor. This time, I write with a deep sense of pessimism about your remaining time in office, three years, if you can last that long.
I’m pessimistic not only because of the poor grades you’ve earned so far in your term but also because many close to you don’t believe you possess the skills, interest and temperament to be the first-class administrator and leader this state needs.
I think you’d agree – at least in private – that you’d be a lot better off today if you had listened to my suggestions last year, as you claimed you planned to in an e-mail you sent me at the time.
For instance, I urged you – with considerable prescience, as you more than anyone know – to “end the blatant politicization” of the State Police, noting that senior law-enforcement professionals had been “subordinated to political operatives” under your predecessor, Gov. George Pataki.
May I say “Dirty Tricks Scandal”? It was your subordinates, including a former Pataki operative, who used the State Police in an effort to damage Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, the key Republican you must get along with to have any hope of having your agenda approved.
The first suggestion I made – in response to your promise to energize the state’s moribund upstate economy – was to “deliver on your pledge to cut property taxes and then go on to cut income, sales, gasoline and business taxes as well.”
Well, you sure haven’t done much of anything on that front.
I urged you to “live in the Governor’s Mansion” so that, unlike your nearly always absent predecessor, you could use it as a meeting center for lawmakers, “where major policy initiatives can be hammered out in cordial, off-the-record, sessions.”
Well, just like Pataki, you’ve turned the Mansion, as well as the Capitol building itself, into a virtual mail drop and you’ve paid the price: no collegiality with members of the Legislature and bitter personal animosities with the legislative leaders.
Can we say “government/legislative dysfunction”?
I also urged you to “appoint the highest-quality individuals to the top administration positions” of state government.
Boy, did you let the public down on that one. Is there anybody in or out of your government who thinks that Richard Baum, your chief of staff, or any of your other top aides have done an outstanding job?
Governor, you may think you still have plenty of time left to change direction, but if you don’t sooner rather than later, someone in your own party – say Attorney General Andrew Cuomo – or a potent Republican candidate – say Mayor Bloomberg – will come gunning for you in 2010.
Here are new suggestions that could help make you a better governor:
* Fire your entire “senior staff.” Enough of the killer-prosecutor types from your old AG’s Office. Your administration needs proven public- and private-sector administrators who are committed to making this a better state, not destroying your political enemies. There are such things as trained “public administrators” and you’d be wise to recruit some.
* Stop lying to the public about what you have been doing.
Driver’s licenses for illegals was NOT about national security or making the roads safer (it WAS about delivering on a political promise to a special-interest group); ethics haven’t been improved (your Inspector General is a joke and the Public Integrity Commission is privately referred to as the Cover Up Commission).
* Replace your helter-skelter policy approach with genuinely transformative goals – like lowering personal income and business taxes, cutting energy costs by building nuclear and clean, coal-fired plants, and merging duplicative layers of government.
* Bring a new “humility” to dealings with your adversaries – and that means stop trying to destroy opponents.
* Move into the Governor’s Mansion and start showing you have the same level of commitment to state government that Govs. Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, your Democratic predecessors, both showed they had.