Can you hear the music? The music to my ears?

Governor Spitzer gave his state of the state address yesterday afternoon, and I caught some of its replay on cable last night. The theme was “One New York”. The Buffalo News has a roundup of what he said yesterday.

The former crusading Attorney General pledged to introduce the concept of “higher ethical standards” to a place where those three words look as if they’re written in Cyrillic.

Again - the speech was light on details, but among his promised reforms include:

provid[ing] health coverage for 500,000 uninsured children, expand charter schools, move to a merit selection process for judicial appointments and tighten restrictions on political donations while setting the stage for public financing for candidates.

I’m down with all of that, and am relieved to discover that Spitzer favors charter school expansion. He did, however, tie that with increased funding for traditional school districts, so that the claims of one cannibalizing the other can be squelched.

He called for a $2 billion borrowing, to be put before voters this fall, to fund stem cell research and other ventures that would lead to commercial applications; he did not specify whether it would include embryonic stem cell research.

I know many will decry this government involvement in private industry, but scientific research and breakthroughs often come with government assistance, because the successful application of stem cell reseach to cure and treat disease - by New York State labs and companies - carries with it not only a business benefit, but an overall social benefit.

Spitzer also proposes streamlining New York’s myriad, oft-redundant, governments through state aid incentives:

…making cities more efficient in return for extra state aid to reducing 4,200 separate, local government taxing jurisdictions through consolidation. The governor vowed his budget will not propose raising taxes, but said the state still can afford to pump significantly more money into schools, cities and health care by making “hard choices” to cut other spending.

Buffalo and Erie County would be nuts not to start taking that very, very seriously.

Wait until you get a load of this next sentence:

“And it’s because we will finally learn to say “no’ to budget requests we simply cannot afford. Until we feel the pain of the word “no,’ we will continue making the same choices that have prevented us from bringing New York back,”

Fingers crossed, wood knocked.

It wasn’t just Democrats who cheered Spitzer, though:

Assembly Republicans, long kept powerless by Democrats who lead the 150-member house. They cheered - literally - his proposals to control spending, open budget deliberations, make elections fairer and end gerrymandering of legislative districts that has reduced the ranks of Republicans in the Assembly.

Spitzer could ride the Dem wave and announce patronage jobs and gerrymandering for everyone, but he’s not. Instead, he intends to make government more fair for everyone. While that may inure to the Republicans’ benefit today, it will someday inevitably be helpful to Democrats, too.

“Eliot Spitzer is the real deal,” Silver said.

Was Silver gnashing his teeth, though? I can’t imagine there won’t be a big power play by one against the other at some point, sooner or later. It will be interesting to watch that dynamic.

Republicans who control the Senate jumped to their feet not once, but twice to applaud Spitzer’s call for $6 billion in property tax relief over three years.

“He’s saying all the right things,” said Sen. Joseph L. Bruno, R-Brunswick, who was re-elected Senate majority leader Wednesday, two weeks after he revealed the FBI is looking into his outside business dealings.

Spitzer expressed amazement and dismay that it’s taken five (5) years to begin construction on Ground Zero in Manhattan. If that’s dismaying, what do you call the Peace Bridge? He plans to speed that up, too.

As the Buffalo News displayed today, loads of former New York State governors have expressed dismay about the fact that New Yorkers are an overtaxed, overburdened population. Carey, Cuomo, and Pataki were all quoted. First days of a new administration bring loads of hope and high expectations. Spitzer seems to be following through on the promise we who supported him saw in him. Time will tell whether he pulls it off, goes down trying, or pulls a Pataki and goes along to get along.

RSS 2.0 Respond Trackback