Spitzer's Rage

The first thing we did yesterday was stop by the office on Lower Broadway of the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, to see how he was faring in the wake of the great showdown with Governor Spitzer. He wasn't in the mood to talk on the record, but if there was a more cheerful, relaxed politician in the state yesterday, we would be surprised. We didn't get the impression that Mr. Silver's mood stemmed from any enjoyment of the fight he'd just had — or even from having won it.

On the contrary, the impression he gave is that he actually didn't think it was that big a deal. At one point he described the issues that come before a leader in the state government as like blips on the screen of an air-traffic controller. There will be hundreds of them in the course of a term. This, he suggested, was but one of the blips.

It struck us as a mark of political maturity, particularly in contrast to the rage of the governor. As Mr. Spitzer vented against the Legislature at his press conference Wednesday, the question that kept running through our mind is: What does the governor want? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that he had been able to block the appointment of Thomas DiNapoli as comptroller and even that he'd been able to get his crony, William Mulrow, installed instead.

Let's say, moreover, that he could end the old way of doing things and set up what by his lights is an honest government, what would he do with it? Would he want lower taxes, an aggressive stance in the war against terror, the United Nations out of New York? Is he for socialism or for free markets? How would the choice of whoever is comptroller fit into the substance of some larger vision?

We've asked this question quite a bit of late, including of some well-placed individuals, and we confess the answers are mystifying. No one seems to know what to make of Mr. Spitzer's rage. Some say that he doesn't like getting steamrolled. Others that the biography of him was aptly named when it was titled "Spoiling for a Fight." Others say that it's that Mr. Spitzer wants to be president.

Accepting the last point for a moment, one is then left asking, why does he want to be president? In the case of President Reagan, to pick a politician with a deep keel, one knew why he wanted to be president — he wanted to lift the dead hand of government off the economy and defeat the Soviet Union. With Mr. Spitzer, it's less clear. We don't belittle the themes the governor struck in his One New York speech. But none of it explains the intensity of his hostility to Mr. DiNapoli, specifically, or even to the Legislature more generally.

Yesterday there was a report on Syracuse.com about the governor's eruption of anger at Assemblyman William Magnarelli, who, a report on the Daily Politics said, had supported a former assemblyman to fill the comptroller's position only to get denounced by the governor as "one of those unfortunate Assembly members who just raises his hand when he's told to do so, and didn't ever stand up and say, ‘Whose interest am I representing?'" It's hard to remember governors talking about legislators like this — particularly a legislator from the governor's own party who only last month issued a glowing assessment of Mr. Spitzer in the Post-Standard as a man with whom the Assembly was ready to partner.

It may be that there is a method in Mr. Spitzer's madness. Our Jacob Gershman has been reporting that there is significant sentiment that any fight Mr. Spitzer has will give him an opening to go over the heads of the Legislature to the people. It's a method Reagan, say, tried from time to time. The difference is that when Reagan tried it, he had differences with the legislature over serious matters of substance — the Cold War, the tax code. Mr. Spitzer has erupted in anger at an Assembly that has — save for abrogating its constitutional rights — shown every willingness to enact what passes for the governor's agenda.