Spitzer should regroup
Inexperienced staff entangles state in scandals and political standoffs

Updated: 09/17/07 7:03 AM


For a governor-elect who came to office with a strong mandate for change and an unequivocal pledge to get that job done, Eliot L. Spitzer has made some damaging — and unnecessary — freshman errors. While he must accept responsibility for that, the political tangles that threaten to immobilize him may be rooted not so much in the strategic decisions he has made as they are in the tactical mistakes of the staff he assembled.

For the most part, administration staffers are bright young attorneys who performed well in the attorney general’s office, Spitzer’s last domain, but made decisions in the governor’s name without a deep enough knowledge or understanding of how to get things done in Albany.

The job of governor is just too big, too convoluted and too idiosyncratic for anyone, no matter how experienced in other branches or agencies of state government, to come into office with a firm grasp on how to make it work. Governors learn by doing. In the meantime, that’s why staffing is important. It’s also why, according to some observers, Spitzer has stumbled in his first eight months as governor.

He came into office with an attorney general’s absolutist perspective, then compounded that weakness by transplanting his staff, who arrived with the same history and the same point of view. It hasn’t worked well.

An attorney general negotiates with an indictment in one hand. A governor usually has to win votes through more traditional forms of persuasion. That means having the facts at hand, making and returning telephone calls, understanding the process. By most accounts, the administration hasn’t been much good at any of that.

Spitzer counted too much on his reputation as attorney general and his overwhelming election victory and too little on securing control of the strings of office, either through his own knowledge or that of aides experienced in getting things done. That failure culminated in the trooper mess, in which transplanted aides misused state police in an effort to undermine Sen. Joseph L. Bruno. While Spitzer is widely seen as a hands-on administrator, investigations so far indicate the aides were acting on their own.

In any event, the pain of the past couple of months may be prompting changes. Some observers see improvement in how the administration approaches legislators and in other aspects of the governor’s job. Aides with outside experience may be becoming more influential.

Those are positive changes, as long as Spitzer remembers he was elected to reform Albany, not to abet those who have driven New York into the ditch, state legislators among them. Spitzer’s challenge is to work productively with the Legislature without being absorbed by its dysfunction. He has managed to make that job more difficult. But it remains a necessary one, for a governor who now has to change the future without getting bogged down in the past.

Buffalo News