It was a few weeks after his inauguration, and the new Governor of New York, George E. Pataki, was celebrating his improbable victory with a dinner for the Albany press corps at the Executive Mansion, his new home on the edge of one of Albany's less-attractive neighborhoods. Loose and relaxed at the slightly drunken and unofficial gathering, Pataki -- his face flushed and the right corner of his mouth lifted in a disarming half-grin --delivered a revealing boast. From his days as the Mayor of Peekskill to his years in the State Assembly and Senate to his challenge to Mario M. Cuomo, Pataki said, his opponents had invariably underestimated him. And that, the new Governor informed his dinner companions, was fine by him.
Pataki was still a stranger to most New Yorkers that night in January 1995, diminished by a political campaign that encouraged voters to ignore him and consider only their dislike for his opponent. He had arrived in Albany encumbered by a reputation that he had helped to create: that he was not particularly smart, not at all visionary, not remotely colorful and certainly not charismatic. He was, by this view, little more than a creation of his patron, Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, and a minor moment in New York politics, destined to be ignored for four years and then discarded with the next gubernatorial election. The reporters at his table that night dismissed his boast as inventive spin from a politician trying to weave his many shortcomings into a strong political suit.
A few Saturdays ago, as he escaped the winter cold of the gray streets of Peekskill for a piece of grilled haddock at a favorite restaurant, Pataki let out a burst of self-assured laughter as he recalled that conversation. He had spent the day walking the sidewalks of the city on the Hudson River where he had grown up, and where he had been Mayor, recounting the better moments of his first two years as Governor. And when it was suggested that the lesson of the first half of his term was in that exchange at the Executive Mansion, the Governor, with a glance at his closest political adviser, Zenia Mucha, nodded in assent.
"If people want to think of me as a mailman's son from Peekskill with the funny name, well. …" Pataki stopped to consider if he wanted to finish the sentence with what would be, for him, an unusual public threat. And then he did not.
"I would never make that mistake," he said.
There is much about George Pataki that is as evident today as it was the day he was sworn into office: his languid speaking style, his vaporous public presence, his loopy if likable Barney Fife mien. He is resolutely low-voltage, neither telegenic nor inspirational, one of the lesser public speakers in American political life today. Even Pataki seemed resigned to the sight of a state assemblyman falling asleep during his State of the State Message this past January.
But two years into office, it has become apparent that Pataki is more than the simple-if-lucky career politician from Peekskill who drove Mario Cuomo from office. Pataki has accomplished -- or, more precisely, attempted -- more upheaval in New York state government in 2 years than Cuomo form office. Pataki has accomplished -- or, more precisely, attempted -- more upheaval in New York state government in 2 years than Cuomo did in 12. He is, it is now clear, much smarter than most people thought. He is also more ambitious, determined, self-disciplined, dogmatic, pragmatic, calculating -- and even, at times, more ruthless. He is as capable as his predecessor of being disingenuous, even if he is not as nimble as Cuomo could be at such moments. (Pataki responded to the revelation of his lucrative out-of-state speaking engagements with the straight-faced explanation that groups would pay him $15,000 to speak even if he were still a suburban state senator.) Pataki is also extraordinarily self-assured, the result of a privileged adulthood, with his Ivy League education, his easy move from Columbia University law School into one of New York's most powerful firms, his unbroken streak of unseating established officeholders and, not incidentally, the advantage that comes from being a whisker short of 6 feet 5 inches tall. Pataki never suffered the indignity of getting beaten up as a kid in the schoolyard, and he has found, as an adult, that height is power in American politics as well: that he towers over virtually every other politician in New York State was a central consideration in D'Amato's decision to select him to run against Cuomo in 1994.
"He has the sort of presumptuousness that comes when things come too easy," says James L. LaRocca, a former State Energy Commissioner who has been studying Pataki in preparation for running against him in 1998.
It is these unlikely qualities that provide the real key to understanding George Pataki. Because it is this fuller picture of Pataki -- and not the context of Pataki as Forrest Gump, suddenly in the Governor's office with his feet on the desk -- that explains his success during first two years as Now York's 53d chief executive. It explains how, as a state assemblyman five years ago, the ostensibly genial Pataki chased from office a popular, elderly Republican state senator, who to this day cannot believe he came after her It explains how he succeeded, as Governor, in pushing through a huge tax cut, startling everyone with his belligerent tactics and single-mindedness ignoring the protests from Democrats, Republicans and even Catholic bishops that the cuts would gut programs that assisted the state's less-fortunate. And it explains how he fixed from the start on an ambitious, if compact, political agenda reflecting his mostly Republican view of the world -- cutting taxes and government spending, eliminating regulations on business, slashing welfare, signing a death penalty bill and advocating environmental protections -- and pursued it purposefully, though not necessarily to complete success.
To this day, Pataki has never gotten over the reaction he encountered when he visited newspapers in 1994 asking for their support: an unkind perception of him that he believes remains pervasive -- notwithstanding the fact that he often has encouraged it when it was politically advantageous. "I was utterly amazed," Pataki says, "as I went around meeting with groups or editorial boards who would scratch their heads and say, 'My God, this guy…'" "'… can complete a sentence,'" Zenia Mucha says, completing his sentence. They both laugh. Mucha, his communication director and most influential adviser, is a Type A to Pataki's Type B so she finishes his sentences, while he, at lunch sometimes finishes her half-eaten sandwich or her half-empty glass of wine. "Has thoughts to complete a sentence," Pataki says, picking up his conversation again. "Actually knows something about the government and has the ability to articulate some interesting positions."
Actually, the observation that Pataki has enjoyed an unexpectedly accomplished first two years in office is becoming widely shared and is held in some unexpected quarters. "I am very pleasantly surprised," says Manfred Ohrenstein, a former minority leader of the State Senate and a power in the Democratic Party's liberal wing. "I have to tell you, I wasn't sure he had the capacity to grow. And I just say it's been dramatic in the last year." Edward I. Koch who more than two years ago dismissed the Governor as a "little frog" from "a little pond" who "hasn't done much swimming now expects to vote for him next year. And Fernando Ferrer, the Democratic Bronx Borough President running for mayor of New York, speaks admiringly of the Governor's political style. "He knows what he wants to do," Ferrer says. "He has a definite vision of where he wants to go -- and he doesn't let human relations get in the way."
Not suprisingly, polls show Pataki's stock on the rise. A Quinnipiac College Polling Institute poll earlier this month reported his job-approval rating at 56 percent, the highest of his term.
Not that Pataki has completely escaped his reputation as a problematic and flawed public figure. He has repeatedly displayed what many social-service advocates describe as a callousness toward constituencies not his own -- the poor. His state commissioner appointments have, with a few exceptions, been mediocre. While that partly reflects the difficulties a party faces staffing a government after being out of office for 20 years, it is also a result of Pataki's determination to reward Republican Party loyalists with high-level positions. He is often not fast on his feet in public settings and does not even try to match wits with reporters. ("You can ask the question any way you want, but I'll give you the answer exactly how I did," Pataki said stiffly to The New York Post's pugnacious Albany bureau chief, Fredric U. Dicker.) He is evasive about taking responsibility for shortcomings in his administration.
Pataki also is not as hard working as his predecessor, preferring to escape Albany for his seeping and serene 24-room, century-old Victorian mansion along the Hudson River in Garrison. He rarely bothers aides with business after dinner of before breakfast. And whole he is smart, he is not necessarily intellectually curious. (He prefers David Letterman to Ted Koppel.) That said, he is not as intellectually tortured as was Cuomo, which goes a long way toward explaining his comparative success.
His self-assuredness has allowed him to appear untroubled by the ethical incidents that have been the recurrent background noise during his first two years in office, from the $2.6 million in private funding for his inauguration and transition to the willing ness with which he has placed D'Amato's political benefactors in key state positions. There is, in none of this, any known evidence of illegality, but there is a continuing appearance of ethical laxity. It has provided hope for Democrats looking for a loose rock in Pataki's foundation and is a source of anguish among some of Pataki's Republican supporters, worried that it could undermine their first New York governorship since Malcolm Wilson was defeated by Hugh L. Carey 22years ago.
Still, given his successes, it is hardly a surprise that many in Pataki's circle, and a few outside it, are now asking that the Governor of New York be counted among the Republicans who cold lead his party back to the White House in 2000. Republican governors have become the national farm team for the party, by Pataki's name has been noticeably absent in the early speculation about the next Presidential race. In suggesting that newspaper writers, columnists and party leaders consider Pataki in this mix, Pataki's political advisers are surely borrowing a ploy from Cuomo, who learned that there was no surer way to increase a governor's standing among voters in New York then by floating his name for President. The notion of Pataki running for the White House is, certainly at first glance, improbable to anyone who has sat through one of his public speeches or his news conferences or television interviews. Still, three years ago, the idea that this mailman's son with the funny name from Peekskill would defeat Mario Cuomo to become the Governor of New York seemed only slightly less improbable.
Libby Pataki, the Governor's wife, is sharp, vivacious and candid in a way that elected officials are not. On a recent Saturday afternoon, she was asked if George Pataki shared his political ambitions with her on their first dates in 1971, when he was working at the Wall Street law firm of the former Gov. Thomas E. Dewey. Libby, George and their 11-year-old daughter, Allison, were settling in for a quiet lunch at Frontiere, a warm patch of a restaurant on a narrow street in SoHo, and Libby Pataki flashed a smile at the memory raised by the question. "Yes," Libby said. "He told me in a letter he wanted to be President one day."
The Governor of New York dropped his spoon into his bowl of winter potage.
"You do?" Pataki's daughter piped up, suddenly curious about the interview she has been unhappily dragged to.
"I do not," the Governor responded firmly.
But Allison was now excited. "Do you want to be President now?" His daughter persisted.
"No. No. No." Pataki looked down at the soup and then shot a slightly annoyed glance at Libby. "I don't remember that letter."
"I've got the letter, George!" Libby responded, teasing out her husband's discomfort in front of a reporter. "I have got the letter. There's nothing wrong with aiming high. Aiming for the stars."
Pataki's drive to succeed in politics has been the underlying and unadvertised force of his professional life. It emboldened him to mount a series of implausible attacks against presumably settled officeholders, from the Mayor of Peekskill to the Governor of New York. And it has been in evidence at each of his stops along the way. Until he became Governor, Pataki used each office not necessarily to accomplish thins but to position himself for the next race.
This central characteristic is often missed, in part because Pataki has the instinct to play it down but mostly because Pataki's success has been under the shadow of Alfonse D'Amato. D'Amato endorsed Pataki after polling by the Senator's pollster, Arthur J. Finkelstein, determined that Pataki, whom D'Amato had first met when he was an assemblyman, fit the profile required to beat Cuomo: a white, moderate Republican from the suburbs; a Roman Catholic with an ethnic name (he is of Hungarian descent) who was in favor of abortion rights. "And it's not like we had a wealth of high-profile candidates who were looking to run," D'Amato says now. The Senator proceeded to power Pataki's ascent, providing him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions, the backing of the Republican Party and the pick of D'Amato's wily stable of aggressive, conservative political advisers. Their closeness has, if anything, intensified since the election, though Pataki and D'Amato go to considerable lengths now to rebut the notion that the Governor is merely a political appendage of the Senator. "It's sour grapes," D'Amato says. "The fact of the matter is that George Pataki is accountable to the people. They can't attack him directly, so they try to cut him with me. It's nonsense." Pataki and D'Amato present themselves as incidental colleagues, with shared political beliefs and separate political lives. "We have two very different functions, two very different roles, two very different settings where we operate," Pataki says. "He operates in Washington; I operate in Albany."
In fact, though, that is not an easy case to make. The two men are not close friends, but they are hard-pressed to come up with substantial areas of political disagreement. And while Pataki says they speak by phone "every few weeks," D'Amato's recollection, in a separate interview, is that it is more like once a week. More concretely, Pataki's political shop came out of D'Amato's office staring with Zenia Mucha, his boisterous and happily profane communications director. D'Amato dispatched her from Washington, where she had worked as his press secretary since 1982, to Pataki's gubernatorial campaign in Albany, where she stayed on as the Governor's communications director. Mucha now influences what Pataki does, who he sees and what he says. And no matter how often Pataki and D'Amato really talk, Mucha is regularly on the telephone with D'Amato, who is one of her closest friends; they trade political gossip one minute and restaurant recommendations the next.
Most important, D'Amato is the single largest financial benefactor of Pataki's campaign. He has funneled $1.9 million from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which he heads, into Pataki's re-election committee. D'Amato's success in promoting Pataki has made the Senator the most powerful Republican New York has seen since Nelson A Rockefeller and, by extension, one of the most influential Republicans in the country. It has also opened a whole new layer of governmental jobs and access, from which D'Amato can help out his friends and supporters. That kind of political influence is remembered when it comes time to write campaign checks.
But D'Amato's forceful sponsorship of Pataki's career has also served to obscure Pataki's own role in his own success. While Pataki might not have won without D'Amato -- to this day, the Governor says he believes D'Amato was important but not essential to his victory -- it seems equally unlikely that D'Amato could have displaced Cuomo with anyone but Pataki. In fact, Pataki took the first critical step toward challenging Cuomo not in late 1993, when he flew to Washington to meet with D'Amato about running, but nearly 18 months before, in a moment of political insurgency that was the first indication to many of his colleagues that there was another side to the mild and affable George Pataki.
The episode involved Mary B. Goodhue, who in 1992 was the only Republican woman serving in the State Senate. She was extremely popular among her colleagues: tough and bright, with a fair amount of influence that came from being a ranking member of the controlling party in the Senate. Pataki was in his fourth term in the Assembly minority, as obscure a station as there is in New York political life. "He was going crazy," Libby says.
Goodhue was standing on what could be the next rung on Pataki's political ladder. Pataki and Goodhue were friends; he had worked as her legal counsel and managed one of her re-election campaigns. So she says she was unprepared for what occurred when Pataki showed up at her office one day in the spring of 1992.
"He said he was going to run in a primary against me," Goodhue recalled. "I said, 'I wish you wouldn't do that.' He said he had to. He couldn't stand the assembly anymore.
"I needed two more years for my pension," says Goodhue, who was 70 years old and had served in the Legislature for 18 years. She promised him that she would serve only one more term and then step aside. "I didn't see how he couldn't stand another two years," Goodhue said. "He said, well, he couldn't." And that was that what perplexed her most, Goodhue thought as Pataki left her office, was how aboveboard he had been about the whole thin. It was just George, her old friend and campaign manager, stopping by to tell her that he was coming after her job, in the same cordial way he might inquire about the health of her grandchildren.
Pataki justifies the incident today, describing it as a matter of ideology rather than crass ambition. "She didn't have that commitment," Pataki says. "She liked being a state Senator -- as opposed to making policy.
"I worked 365 days in the Assembly, with extremely limited power, with a clear view and an agenda. And I saw people with enormous power, with no agenda, allowing the opportunities that their power gave them to slip by. And finally I said, 'This is it: Either I go back to the real world and make money and practice law and do the farm, or I have an impact.' I didn't want to just hang around."
The following January, the now Senator-elect Pataki arrived in Albany to face a hostile class of Republicans mindful that he had dispatched Goodhue with a campaign that would have been considered harsh even if a Democrat had run it: Pataki pummeled her for taking her grandchildren on a Florida vacation during budget negotiations. Pataki did little to salve the wound. When it came time to vote on the state budget that the Senate majority leader, Ralph J. Marino, had negotiated with Cuomo and the Assembly Democrats, Pataki defied his colleagues again, announcing he would oppose it because it cut neither taxes nor spending. The republicans gathered in emergency conference for a five-hour battle with Pataki that his friend, state Senator Nicholas A. Spano of Westchester, remembers to this day as the single most searing political meeting of his life.
The setting was the majority's conference room, which is on a third-floor corner of the Capitol. It is al carved mahogany and red velvet and as large as a small house. A wooden table runs from one end to the other, and at one end sat Marino. "We can't let you not vote for this one," Marino said, according to several participants. "All the loyal Republicans are voting for it." Marino was a gray and somber veteran legislator from Lon Island, whom Pataki already disliked because he believed Marino had joined Anthony J Colavita, the Westchester Count Republican chairman, in convincing Goodhue to stay in the race against him.
Marino was well liked in the Legislature and not accustomed to this kind of disloyalty. But Pataki crossed his arms in defiance. ""I'm sorry, Senator," Pataki said. "But that's the way it is." Marino later told associates he left convinced that Pataki was running for Governor and would without hesitation embarrass his colleagues for the sake of an issue -- taxes -- to use against Cuomo. Marino decided he would oppose Pataki if he ran.
Marino paid a price for that decision, and he was not alone. Three weeks after Pataki went from being state Senator to Governor-elect, the Republicans gathered in the same conference room and -- acting on instructions from Pataki -- ended Marino's career as the majority leader of the state Senate. At the time, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York was, with obvious public embarrassment, still waiting for Pataki to return his election night congratulatory calls. Giuliani had aggressively campaigned for Cuomo, a fateful political miscalculation that -- public statements by the two men aside -- has produced lasting enmity between the Republican Governor and the Republican Mayor. And a few days after Marino's disposal, Nick Spano was dispatched by Pataki to visit a third Republican he viewed as an enemy -- Tony Colavita, the Westchester Republican leader and Marino's lieutenant. "Tony," said the soft-spoken and amiable Spano, folding his stocky frame into a chair to convey the message from the Governor-elect. "I'm here to offer you the chance to chair your retirement party." It was one sign of what was to come in Albany.
It was a cold and uncommonly bright January afternoon in Albany, and Pataki was seated in his office on the second floor of the state Capitol, his long legs stretched out on top of his desk, which was littered with pages of a draft of his upcoming State of the State speech, an open I.B.M. laptop and a Styrofoam bowl overflowing with vegetable soup. The Governor's office is not what it was when Cuomo was there -- literally. Pataki has moved it one room west, from the dark quarters where Cuomo spent so much of his time to the bright and airy conference room next door. Its wall are covered with pastoral scenes along the Hudson River and portraits of Teddy Roosevelt. There is a picture window looking across State Street at the Empire State Mall, where a once-abandoned skating rink has come back to life and is now alive with skaters. Pataki rises from his char and walks over to take in the view. "When I got here," he says, gesturing to the scene outside his window, "this looked a lot like downtown Moscow." He waved to the skaters. Pataki's figure -- the long, string-bean arms rolling off stooped shoulders, the elongated head topped with a brush of brown, thinning hair -- is easy to recognize from across the street and a few skaters waved back.
In the final stages of speech preparation, he turns from the skaters to the papers on his desk, moving his lips as he reads through some passages. He is trying to anticipate the reaction from legislators, many of whom don't like or trust him very much, a sentiment he quietly returns. "If we don't say we're going to lower the gross receipts tax, the first thing Silver is going to do is propose cutting the gross receipts tax and say how unfortunate it is that we did not," Pataki says, referring to Sheldon Silver, the Assembly Speaker from Manhattan's Lower East Side who, as the highest-ranking Democrat in the state, has almost single-handedly carried the brunt of making the daily case against Pataki. The Governor begins scribbling in the margins. "Let's make it, 'We have lowered the gross receipts tax and we must lower it more.' I'm not saying when -- right?" Zenia Mucha and Brad Race, his chief of staff, nod in agreement.
It was less than 24 hours before one of the pivotal moments in any Governor's year: the delivery of the State of the State Message, a chance to set the parameters for the coming year while putting the best light on the past one. This speech will be watched particularly closely. Relations between the Governor and the legislative leaders are more troubled then ever. Although his name will not appear on the ballot for two more years, this is the year that Pataki will start setting the tone for his re-election.
Pataki approaches these most public of moments as New York's chief executive with a decided disadvantage. His every speech is measured against the speaking talents of his predecessor, Mario Cuomo. It is a contest Pataki cannot win; he knows it and resents it. But he can do nothing about it. Despite his considerable physical presence, the Governor has a thin, reedy voice. He swallows some words and mangles others. So it is that on one day, the word "drugs" came out "jugs," as in "stay away from jugs," and on another, a well-known New York City television interviewer seemed mystified when it appeared that the Governor called him first Abe and then Dave. (In fact, Pataki was correctly addressing him as Gave.) And Pataki, who is 51 years old, is visually ill suited for television; his face is good-natured and pleasant enough, but it is rarely emotive and thus not interesting to watch. He tends to hold one expression in his public presentations -- earnest, his mouth cocked in an uneven grin, his eyes so puffed and droopy that is sometimes seems even he is fighting to stay awake. It all combines to distract from what he is saying.
Despite the stakes, Pataki could not appear more relaxed as he prepares for his speech. He sits at his desk, chattering away as he pushes a basketball up the length of his spindly legs before letting it roll back into his lap. There is no snapping at aides, no anguish last-minute write-throughs, not a moment's thought of skipping dinner. When he returns to the Assembly chamber for a planned midnight run-through, his staff suggests ways to animate what will be a long 60-minute speech. Still, reality is reality, and no one can take the rehearsal too seriously. "Show some outrage!" Zenia Mucha bellows to her boss from the empty Assembly floor. Pataki grins and shrugs, lolling on into the next part of his speech.
These easy-going couple of hours are genuinely representative of the Governor's personal style. They are also, she says, representative of his governing style. Pataki presents himself as an accommodationist, a leader who prefers friendly negotiations to unseemly squabbling. "I always prefer cooperation to confrontation," he says. After he gives the State of the State speech --which is, for all his efforts, unmemorable and tepidly received -- he resists every invitation from reporters to disparage his opponents. In stead, he returns, with characteristic discipline and obvious coaching from his political pollsters, to the theme of "common ground." "What you have to worry about," he says, his face still glistening from the sweat of the television lights as he walks back into his office, "is what the public interest is, trying to find the common ground."
But this really is not quit true. When it comes to tactics, there is often a difference between what Pataki says he does and what Pataki actually does. And the foes of Pataki who have been lulled by his conciliatory language have, at times, paid a price for that complacency. His largest legislative victories (and some of his more memorable defeats) came in confrontations that were notable not for their search for a common ground but for their political brutality. "He was like a little put bull," says Maggie Boepple, the former chief of New York City lobbyist under Mayor Koch, describing his successful fight to reform the state's $5 billion worker's compensation program.
That approach was even more in evidence with the 1995 tax cut. Pataki had campaigned on a promise of a 25-percent income tax cut that would eventually cost the state $6.8 billion in annual lost revenues. The Cuomo administration left a $5 billion deficit. Most observers assumed this would force Pataki to delay his tax cut, which is what the Cuomo administration had routinely done with its own tax cut. Pataki informed reporters that he was going to do what he had promised. "I think people are going to be amazed by the consistency of the message," Pataki said on his second day as Governor. He called for the tax cut, along with more than $1 billion in budget cuts, mostly directed at health care for the poor and aid for higher education. Assembly Speaker Silver countered with a more-modest tax cut, with more benefits directed to middle-class taxpayers. But Pataki dominated the debate. "Those who were opposed were very, very shocked by the degree with which I said, 'This is going to happen,'" Pataki says now. "And it wasn't just Democrats in the Assembly and interest groups who were opposed. I think there were those in the Senate who were absolutely stunned. Republican after Republican said: 'You just can't do this. Now, you've won the election; now, let's see what we can really do.'"
Faced with resistance, that Governor announced that no one in the capital -- from the Governor to the legislators to the employees who operate the Assembly switchboard -- would get paid after the current budget expired on April 1 unless a new budget, with tax-cuts, was passed. He countenanced broadcasting $1 million worth of advertisements attacking 20 Democratic lawmakers who opposed him. And Pataki's political lieutenants made clear that the Republicans would follow the victory in the Governor's office with an equally aggressive bid to take over the Democratic-controlled Assembly. It was a new era in New York state politics, where until now legislators never worried about being attacked at home in off-election years.
But it was Pataki who was at the center of the political squall. He was the subject of sensational advertisements produced by Democrats and unions, warning of catastrophic results from his cuts in Medicaid in particular. A state association of county executives, including fellow-Republicans, urged Pataki to delay the tax breaks, concerned about the cuts in state aid they would force; a leader of the state's Catholic Bishops described his plan as a "much meaner budget than we've seen probably ever in the history of the state." Polls showed Pataki's popularity in decline, with one New York Times poll finding that large numbers of New Yorkers were worried that he was moving too fast to cut government. Pataki accused his opponents of "fearmongering" and in ads made Silver the symbol of the opposition to tax cuts, "the powerful New York City liberal boss of the Assembly." It was hardball unlike anyone had seen in Albany before, all the more unexpected because the man on the mound was Pataki.
In the end, Pataki got most of what he wanted though Silver was successful in transferring some of the tax cuts from the upper to the middle class -- including an unheard -of 1 percent cut in state spending. But it came at a high cost. The Legislature passed the budget a few hours shy of the record for being latest, intentionally snubbing a Governor who had promised to end Cuomo's record of tardy budgets. Pataki's antagonistic tactics united Democrats against him, and the resulting atmosphere threatened to complicate anything he attempted to do with the Legislature again. "If anything, I think it hurt," says Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate Republican majority leader, who otherwise describes Pataki's first two years in glowing terms. "It gave the wrong message: the message being you have to agree to whatever -- whether you agree or not -- just to get a budget. Legislators don't do that. And they proved that."
Pataki rejects that analysis, asserting that it was his very unexpected aggressiveness that force the tax cut. "I don't think anyone would admit it, but I happen to think this is the case," Pataki says, adding as an aside, "I think they were impressed by the tenacity with which I approached the issue.
"I think early on -- whether it was the income tax cuts or the workers' comp reform or some of the welfare reform measures -- they all said, 'Let's wait them out and they'll cave.' Now they're starting to think that it's the other way around. That I'm serious about what we're proposing and that I am not unwilling to have confrontation if that's what's necessary to achieve important changes."
Pataki's negotiating style came as all the more of a surprise because it was so different from his easygoing and slightly detached day-to-day governing style. Pataki spends far less time in Albany than previous Governors, preferring his Manhattan office. And he spends less time at work than his predecessors, another contrast with the ever-toiling Mario Cuomo. "I don't think he's dumb; I think he's lazy," says Sheldon Silver, with a slight smile that suggests he is speaking only partly in jest. Pataki's disaffection with Albany is demonstrated by his pending as few nights as possible into the stately and stuffy Executive Mansion. He prefers the 90-minute drive to Garrison, where Libby, who works as a consultant to Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics company executive and Republican Party benefactor, lives full-time with their four children. And even there, Pataki chafes at the trappings of his position. He has been known to slip past his State Police guard for a walk by the Hudson Rover or a jaunt down the road to Peekskill.
On the shuttle back from Washington one weekday recently, Pataki was publicly scolded midair by a New York clergyman, disturbed by the Governor's latest proposal to cut welfare. Twenty-four hours later, Pataki was still brooding about the confrontation. If there is one area in which Pataki's agenda has produced only limited success, it is welfare, where Assembly Democrats have blocked his mot drastic measures: time limits and benefits cuts. But President Clinton's signing of a Federal welfare law last year will force the state to act, and one of the new mandates is that healthy recipients of food stamps work 20 hours a week. Congress included a provision allowing states to seek a waiver if there were no jobs available, but Pataki -- who has spent much of his career advocating similar welfare restrictions -- vowed to not seek the waiver. And he seemed utterly perplexed by the repugnance that greeted this. When a reporter suggests that some people might view the notion of depriving the needy of food stamps as a cruel way to encourage work -- particularly because it involved Federal and not state money -- the Governor slaps his hand on the table in an uncharacteristic display of temper.
"How?" he demands. "How? Answer me!"
"All we're saying is we're going to expect something in return from you in exchange for this benefit. Not because its saves us pennies -- it doesn't. But because it tells them that they have the ability to do something and that we expect that they will do something to get something in return. And to me, it's just so clearly the right principle for us as a society and for that person as an individual that I am confused by the apparent concern of those who oppose it." There was a chasm here between the theories that Pataki was describing and the economic reality of parts of New York State, but Pataki was too certain of his views to accept that And three weeks later, as opposition swelled and it became increasingly clear that many counties were not prepared to help recipients find work, Pataki uncharacteristically backed down and reluctantly sought the waiver.
It was an instructive episode. A running Democratic criticism of Pataki is that he has no ideology, that he is a product of polls who believes in nothing except the next election. "There's no substance behind him," Silver says. "He's very good at sound bites. He's moved by the polls." H. Carl McCall, the Democratic State Controller who is considering challenging Pataki next year (the other major prospective candidate is Representative Charles E. Schumer of Brooklyn) describes Pataki as "very non-ideological. I think he's not someone spending a lot of time thinking through what his grand scheme is."
This perception is reinforced by the presence on the campaign payroll of Arthur Finkelstein, the pollster shared by Pataki and D'Amato. And Pataki has muddied his own ideological waters. Like other moderate Republican governors representing politically centrist states, Pataki starts with the familiar Republican emphases on taxes and crime and adds some un-Republican twists, starting with the environment. The fight against pollution has at times been forgotten when it clashed with his administration's desire to help business by lifting regulations, but there is no doubt that Pataki's interest in the issue is genuine, if politically fortuitous. It was symbolized last year by Pataki's successful advocacy of the $1.75 billion Clean Water/Clean Air Bond Act, which even Democrats viewed as a masterstroke.
Along the same lines Pataki signed an executive order barring discrimination by state agencies against gays and lesbians. He joined other moderate Republican governors in an unsuccessful effort to prevent putting the Republican Party on record against abortion rights. He is known among reporters as a Republican who will offer a critical quote of newt Gingrich, the House Speaker. In none of this is there evidence that Pataki has embraced a position he is uncomfortable with, with one possible exception: abortion rights. Pataki, like some other Roman Catholic politicians, migrated to his present position in favor of abortion rights, but his switches -- there were more than one -- were sloppier than most, ultimately leaving his credentials in doubt on both sides of the issue.
Still, on the core Republican issues, Pataki is as ideologically grounded today as he was when he came to Albany in 1985: cutting taxes reducing government and welfare and fighting crime, as evidenced by his signing a death-penalty bill nine weeks after taking office. "I believe in a very active government, but a government that has a very limited role," he said a few weeks ago as he walked on a dirt path overlooking a particularly striking turn in the Hudson River near his home. He was clutching a walking stick as Zenia Mucha, speaking on a cellular telephone, tried to keep up "And tat role is to fix, to create the climate where things that are broken can be fixed, or create the climate where thins that can be enhanced." Indeed, Pataki goes so far -- at least when he is outside of New York -- to portray his victory ver Mario Cuomo as a defining moment in the struggle between liberal and conservative ideals.
"Mario Cuomo's defeat signaled the death of liberalism," Pataki said to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization in Washington in July 1995. "After all, it wasn't Mario Cuomo who was defeated. It was his philosophy of more government, more spending and more taxes." Pataki's work in New York has, accordingly, won more than a little notice from national conservative circles. "Saving New York from Liberalism?" Read the headline over one flattering cover story on Pataki that appeared in The weekly Standard, the influential conservative publication. The Cato Institute, the conservative economic organization, in a review of the fiscal efforts of various states awarded Pataki an A for his work in New York. "No governor has done a better job of digging their state out of fiscal hole than Pataki did," said Stephen Moore, the institute's director of fiscal policy studies.
Given that, even Martin Connor, the Brooklyn Democrat who is the Senate minority leader, has come to differ with Silver on the depth of Pataki's ideological convictions. "He does believe in the basic Republican philosophy -- he really does," says Connor. "I think he has a philosophical under pinning there. I think he fundamentally is a Republican. There is no doubt about it." George H. Winner Jr., the Elmira Republican who was a minority floor leader when Pataki came to the Assembly, says Pataki today is enacting the same agenda that the Assembly Republicans were talking about 10 years ago. "He believed in our agenda," says Winner. "Our agenda is what his is doing right now."
There is a sort of quiet resentment that sometimes seems to gnaw at Pataki as he begins planning for his next election. It is that he is still compared to Mario Cuomo, notwithstanding the fact hat no one in the state has encouraged this more than Pataki himself. That he has not received the credit he feels is due. That other Republican governors have captured national attention while the man who beat Cuomo has not. That he is still viewed as an extension of D'Amato. And that he is still perceived as a bit dim. "There aren't a whole lot of people," says Pataki, "who were raining scholars at Yale or Columbia, who made Law Review who I am aware of who had a hard time competing a sentence."
For all that, though, Pataki seems to have little to worry about as he approaches the 1998 election. Luck is with him. The economy is booming, which means his tax cuts should not force any politically disruptive spending cuts. Crime is down. Then Democratic Party was left in disarray by Mario Cuomo. And Pataki himself towers in a political arena arguably bereft of political talent. But more than that, Pataki has assembled the kind of record that can be turned into the most compelling sort of campaign ads: the tax cuts, the reduction in welfare rolls, the death penalty, the environmental bond act.
The Democrats' best hope may well be the manner in which he financed his $2.6 million transition and three-day inaugural. It took an Assembly subpoena and court order to force the release of the names of Pataki's inaugural benefactors and their expenditures. Still, even that issue does not seem to rise to the level of scandal that moves voters to cast out an incumbent during good times. Pataki's skill at evading embarrassing issues has been particularly in evidence here. (The Governor says he can't understand why his political aides didn't just release the names in the first place. "In retrospect," he says, the disarming half-grin back on his face, "I would have preferred that we didn't even have an inaugural. Libby and I could have gone out for a hamburger.")
In the end, that is one telling symbol of Pataki's political emergence in New York that's past two years, and that is D'Amato. The revelation that D'Amato has shuffled $1.9 million into Pataki's re-election was originally taken as another example of the Senator tending to the political needs of his ward, the Governor. In truth, though, the Senator may not be considering the Governor's political needs at all. Pataki and D'Amato are both up for re-election in 1998, and it is Pataki's name that appears first on the ballot. The way things are going, Al D'Amato may be looking to George Pataki to carry him across the finish line.