What's Wrong With New York?

I've written about political corruption in Albany a few times in these pages. See here and here.

Mostly I concluded, and continue to conclude, that the issue is very complex, politicians' approaches to the issue have tended to infantilize it, and that no approach will succeed until the issue is taken seriously. Stricter rules, by themselves, are not an attempt to take the issue seriously. They are window dressing, at best, distractions at worst.

That corruption is rampant in Albany is something of a cliché at this point. Usually corruption is, like dysfunction, a code word for “the system didn't produce the results I wanted, therefore there must be something wrong with it.” Few, however, would disagree that the New York State Legislature has been corrupt and dysfunctional even apart from any results it has, or has not, produced! But I have to say I think there is a degree to which I didn't realize just how corrupt Albany was until I heard about the plight of now-former (as of Friday December 3, 2010) State Senator Vincent Leibell. See here and here.

From everything I have read and every insider I have spoken to (or listened to when it appeared I was not listening), Vincent Leibell would have stood an excellent chance of winning a “State Senator least likely to be corrupt” award, had such an award existed. If there were any indications until now that he was corrupt, I didn't see them in anything I read about him, and no one I ever spoke to or listened to had any inkling.

Did I miss something, I wonder? Did those whom I spoke to or listened to miss something? Perhaps. Maybe this wasn't a surprise to everyone, like it was to me.

Or, perhaps, things have gotten so bad in Albany that even whose who appear honest aren't.

After Leibell's troubles have come to light, the cliché that Albany (and the New York State Legislature in particular) is corrupt to the core seems to me to be less cliché than fact. I do not mean to say that every politician, or even every State Legislator, whose feet have ever touched Albany is corrupt; that would be a statistical implausibility. (I am no longer prepared to call anything impossible, but calling it implausible seems safe.) But I do mean that, after Vinnie Leibell's troubles came to light, I no longer feel safe in assuming that most of New York's public servants are honest, keep their noses as clean as the savage nature of political life will allow, and want to do good. I no longer believe that corruption isn't the norm. I no longer believe that Albany's “culture of corruption” is the product of too many bad apples whose actions have a very large ripple effect. Such beliefs, which I once considered realistic, now seem naïve.

In brief, after the revelations about Vinnie Leibell, I'm way more inclined to think that corruption is the norm.

Through a lot of reading on political ethics, I've realized something interesting and disturbing: The corruption in the New York State Legislature breaks many key expectations Political Scientists have about corruption in State Legislatures. Alan Rosenthal, a scholar from New Jersey, suggests we can expect State Legislatures to be less corrupt if they are professionalized, which New York's Legislature surely is. He also writes that by and large State Legislatures are less corrupt today (though technically when he wrote this it was in the 1990s) than they were in the 1960s. If this is true in New York I dread to think of the 1960s.

So what's going on? What's wrong with New York? What's going on that makes Alan Rosenthal, who has devoted a career to studying State politics, wrong in some of his key expectations (at least when it comes to New York)?

Another Political Scientist, Joseph F. Zimmerman (who teaches at SUNY Albany and, like Alan Rosenthal, has been investigating state politics for many years), suggests that an “individualistic” political culture, like New York's, promotes political corruption. While this may be true, he also suggests, rightly, that alternative political cultures can't be set up easily. And I would like to think that there are ways to stem corruption other than wholesale alterations of a State's political culture. New York State's individualism has had many positive effects which I would hate to lose.

Zimmerman also wrote that political corruption was “limited only by the ingenuity of the human mind.” Surely, and sadly, this is one way in which Political Science's expectations are not broken by the New York State experience.

From what I have heard and read of baseball during the 1980s and 1990s, if you were a baseball player back then, you faced a stark choice between using steroids and accepting a second-class status. Maybe that's the issue here as well. Maybe after seeing “everyone else” get away with so much, one feels stupid for not being corrupt.

Maybe the New York State Legislature, despite having a pretty large staff (the State Senate alone is a $100 million a year business and surely a good amount of that is staff), doesn't have the right kind of staff. Perhaps the staff is too politically minded, is too focused on finding problems that need to be solved and not focused enough on finding solutions to known problems, and perhaps telling the boss what he doesn't want to hear. (Another Political Scientist, Michael Malbin, describes a similar dynamic among Congressional staff. Now that I think about it, he's written about ethics too. And now that I think about it a little more, he teaches at SUNY Albany, along with Joseph Zimmerman).

One would think that someone on staff should have told Vinnie Leibell to not do whatever it was he was doing. Maybe no one felt comfortable saying no to the boss. Maybe he kept whatever he was doing to himself. Even had Leibell's actions not risen to the level of a federal crime, surely they would've looked bad. And I should think that, as a politician, Vinnie Leibell understood that he had to mind his image. And if he didn't, someone on staff should have. Or, perhaps Leibell just didn't listen.

Perhaps it's simply the fact that New York State doesn't take ethics seriously. Alan Rosenthal and Joseph Zimmerman both agree that ethics needs to be taken seriously as a policy issue. There are no easy answers. Attempts at easy answers fail. New York's current ethics law is alone proof of that. The pathetic “mocha protocol” has done nothing to stem the rising tide of legislative corruption.

No matter how much more there is to say on political ethics, I find myself returning again and again to my shock. Vinnie Leibell, who from what I can tell was known for his honesty and integrity and intelligence, is, it would seem, corrupt.

If Vinnie Leibell is corrupt, as far as I am concerned, all of them probably are, to one degree or another.

So, what's wrong with New York?

Perhaps Leibell's troubles will serve as a wake-up call? No, I don't think so. Joe Bruno's conviction wasn't a wake-up call for the Democratic Senate leadership. If it had been, surely the AEG scandal wouldn't have happened.

So, what's wrong with New York? How many wake-up calls does the New York State Legislature need before it finally wakes up? How does New York so-completely break the expectations of people who have spent a career studying politics?

I have cited three Political Scientists in this article. Any one of them, or all of them together, could help to inform a new ethics policy, one which would surely be literate and realistic and deal with the issue in an intelligent way. And they may even have insights into what makes New York so unique, or at least makes it seem so unique, on this front, why New York breaks expectation. Two of them work in walking distance of the New York State Capitol. The other works in New Jersey, which isn't all that far away. Pick up the phone, send staff to the library.

What's wrong with New York?

More words fail me.