If you’re anything like me, the impending New York gubernatorial race isn’t getting you too excited. On the Democratic side, Governor David A. Paterson’s performance has been between unimpressive and terrible; Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been a competent attorney general, but has a reputation for arrogance and paranoia that might not play well in the Governor’s Mansion; and former Nassau County executive Tom Suozzi ceased to be a viable dark horse option when he suffered an upset defeat in his re-election bid last year.
But, as always seems to be the case these days, no matter how unimpressive the Democratic field might be, the Republican field is even worse. So far there are two announced Republican candidates: Warren Redlich and Enrico “Rick” Lazio ’80. Redlich is likely not a credible candidate, so I won’t spend much time on him, suffice it to say that he twice ran for the U.S. House of Representatives unsuccessfully in my home district—New York’s 21nd district—and did not seem to have much to say other than that the United States spends too much money defending France. (I’m not kidding. That was basically his entire platform.) Lazio is a much more likely candidate. As a Vassar College graduate who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and unsuccessfully ran against Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate in 2000, he has become, with the announcement that Rudy Giuliani will not seek the governorship, the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Wanting to know more about the would-be GOP nominee for the New York governorship, I took a look at his website. I fully expected not to agree with most of his stated positions—I’m a liberal Democrat, after all, and he’s a Republican. What I didn’t expect was just how vacuous his website would be. He announced his candidacy in September 2009, and yet had very few real policy positions to discuss.
Here’s my favorite example. This is, word for word, his entire section on reforming health care: “Medicare and Medicaid are the nation’s two largest entitlement programs. They are also facing multi-trillion dollar deficits in coming decades, due to expenditures, which are minimizing tax revenues. New York spends almost twice per capita on Medicaid spending than anywhere else in the country.”
That’s it. That’s all he has to say about reforming health care. Did you see any semblance of a plan there? Neither did I.
Overall, his site says he is running on three principles: getting our financial house in order, returning integrity to government and creating jobs. But, unfortunately, many of his ideas as to how to do those things are only marginally more specific than his health care reform plan, and can’t really be argued with because there’s nothing to argue with.
In many cases it seems like he’s painstakingly trying to avoid saying anything meaningful. He says, for instance, that to put our fiscal house in order, “our regions should be able to make more decisions [emphasis mine] about Medicaid spending, workers compensation mandates, and other costly programs.” “More” decisions? This is a thinly veiled way of avoiding saying “tough” decisions, which is likewise a thinly-veiled way of saying “funding cuts.” He’s reducing himself to using a euphemism for a euphemism.
As for the few semblances of actual ideas he presents, they strike me as profoundly unrealistic. His first idea to reduce New York’s budget deficit is to cap the property tax. Capping the property tax may be a worthwhile endeavor on its own, but it’s not going to do anything to fix the budget deficit. If anything, it would probably make the deficit worse, since government relies on taxation for revenue and capping the property tax would likewise cap the revenue the government can collect. So it is very disingenuous to put this proposal in this section. Similarly, his first proposal for creating jobs is to reduce government spending. Again, reducing government spending might be a respectable proposal, but it does not create jobs. On the contrary, government spending often provides critical economic stimulus during hard times, and attempts to roll back government spending during such times can inhibit economic recovery. Former President of the United States Franklin Roosevelt learned this the hard way. His New Deal spending initiatives helped to substantially reduce the impact of the Great Depression; unemployment dropped steadily for the first several years of his presidency. But after a few years he cut back on these initiatives in an attempt to get the budget back under control. Unemployment instantly jumped back up again as a result.
If Rick Lazio wants to make the case that controlling the deficit is more important than unemployment, he should make that case. Instead he promotes idealized fantasies that present false hopes about what certain proposals would do.
New Yorkers have a lot to be angry about and deserve a frank discussion about how we can fix our state. Other than voting out every single New York State Senator, there are no easy ways to fix any of them. (Seriously, all of you, vote against your State Senator this year. If Richard Nixon were resurrected and placed in the New York State Senate, he’d be the most honest member there.) But a good start would be not having a governor who thinks we can have our cake and eat it too. We may need change, but Governor Rick Lazio is not the change we need.
—Brian Hamm ’09 was Vice President of the Vassar Democrats during his senior year at Vassar. Hamm is a New York State resident.
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