Why One Democrat Thinks New York Needs a Strong GOP
The state's voters will have about as much say in electing Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand as they did in selecting her.
www.wsj.com
By DAVID PARKER Last month, about 240,000 registered Democrats in New York City—myself included—voted in a runoff election for public advocate and comptroller, two of New York's three directly elected citywide offices. Facing only nominal Republican opposition in November, the winners of the runoff—John Liu in the comptroller race, and Bill de Blasio in the public advocate race—are essentially guaranteed victory in the general election. In other words, two of the top three municipal offices in the nation's largest city were chosen by 6% of the city's electorate. That isn't democracy. It's oligarchy. And it's not working.
It wasn't so long ago that we Democrats were celebrating our dominance. Last November, I joined hundreds of my fellow Democrats at an election night event hosted by the New York state Democratic Party. We celebrated the election of a Democratic president, a Democratic landslide in Congress, and with equal excitement the news that the New York state Senate, that last bastion of Republican control in our home state, had fallen into Democratic hands. For the first time since 1935, Democrats would control the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature. 2009 was going to be a great year.
Yet it hasn't been—not for the Democratic Party and not for New York.
In June, the state Senate was thrown into disorder when two Democratic members—Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram Monserrate—staged a parliamentary coup and attempted to reinstall the Republican leadership. Last month, New York's Democratic Gov. David Paterson lost the public support of our party's national-standard bearer, the president of the United States. Meanwhile, New Yorkers continue to pay among the highest taxes in the nation, footing the bill for the backdoor borrowing of the state's hundreds of barely regulated authorities, a bloated public workforce rife with redundancies, and of course, the salaries of indicted state legislators (including Sen. Monserrate, recently convicted of misdemeanor assault—and still collecting a paycheck).
New York has seen tough times before. This time, however, we Democrats have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Single-party rule has been a disaster for New York. New York needs competition. New York needs Republicans.To begin with, democracy demands meaningful competition—and Democratic primaries alone rarely provide it. In what consultants call "low-turnout, low-information" campaigns, a tiny percentage of the electorate makes decisions that are often heavily influenced by the opinions of an even smaller elite: the editorial boards, political committees of labor unions, and elected officials whose endorsements often carry the day for candidates. Since candidates in primaries rarely have substantive differences of opinion, the electorate is robbed of a back-and-forth discussion on the issues.
In New York City, we are so often told that victories in Democratic primaries are tantamount to election that we have forgotten what a perversion of functional democracy such a statement represents. There are about 1.2 million registered Republicans and unaffiliated "blanks" (independent voters) in New York City—28% of the total electorate—who are effectively disenfranchised every time the winner of a Democratic primary faces no real opposition in a general election.
Ironically, Democratic primaries—in which party bosses often play an outsize role—have also had the effect of disenfranchising Democratic voters. Currently, the Democratic leadership has discouraged any primary challenges to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was appointed to finish Hillary Clinton's term. If the Democratic Party has its way, Democratic voters will have about as much say in electing Sen. Gillibrand as we had in selecting her. That is to say, absolutely none.
Democrats have also used their muscle to fight structural reforms. When Mike Bloomberg (full disclosure: the mayor is a former client) pushed to replace primaries with nonpartisan elections in a 2003 referendum, the Democratic Party pulled out all the stops to defeat the measure.
Lack of competition has lulled Democrats into a complacency that borders on corruption. In recent years, two of the signature achievements of the New York City Council have been orchestrating a massive fraud against taxpayers by allocating money to phony nonprofits and parking the money in a slush fund for later use, and voting to extend the term limits of its own members. Some of these members rarely show up for work, while others take public funds for essentially uncontested general elections. Both actions could be considered stealing from taxpayers. Is it a coincidence that the Council is composed of three Republicans and 48 Democrats? Without effective checks on the power of the majority, the Council acts in its own best interests—not those of the people.To be sure, Republicans played a major role in helping construct the current broken edifice of state government. And the Republican Party must address its own identity issues: Many New York Republicans share little in common with each other, much less with the more conservative forces that dominate the national party.
More important, Republicans need to field competitive candidates in more races. Outside of safe districts, Republicans rarely contest legislative contests at the local, state or federal level. This may be a practical decision based on limited resources, but it's not the path to viability. After all, many voters are willing to cross party lines: Despite its overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, New York City hasn't elected a Democratic mayor in 20 years. And before the election of Eliot Spitzer in 2006, New York state—also with far more Democrats than Republicans—elected Republican Gov. George Pataki three times in a row.
Most of all, lust for power has diminished the integrity of both parties. In a just world, cynical opportunists like the state senators who led the summer's coup should find themselves without political homes, not the subject of a bidding war. (Democrats gave Sen. Monserrate, then under indictment, a committee chairmanship and attendant stipend. The chaos in the Senate ended when final holdout Sen. Espada returned to the Democratic fold—as Democratic majority leader).
Democracy does not work without real competition, and contested elections between candidates with material differences provide voters with meaningful choices. New York doesn't need less partisanship. It needs more.
Mr. Parker is a political consultant and writer in New York.
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This is a very good op-ed. Having lived in NY my whole life, I have NEVER seen it this bad.
