The addition of an aggressive personality with an ambitious agenda has, perversely, gummed up the works. Since then, Albany has in many ways become more dysfunctional than ever. This is one (but far from the only) reason that Albany is home to what may be the most dysfunctional state government in the nation.Ī year ago, Eliot Spitzer, the real-estate scion and crusading attorney general, won a lightly contested race for governor, against a Republican named John Faso, by promising to put an end to that dysfunction. The proliferation of cross-purposes and strange bedfellows makes for pernicious and complicated arbitrating. As such, Albany is the arbiter in New York’s ceaseless upstate-downstate tug-of-war, which simultaneously pits rural Republicans against big-city liberals, and Rust Belt Democrats against supply-side suburbanites. The capital, Albany, is at the joint of the L, and seems to benefit-thrive would be too strong a word-whichever way the fortune flows, but it is still remote, in the way of capitals, like Brasília or Canberra, that were designed not to favor one constituency over another, except perhaps the one in residence. In recent decades, Buffalo, at one end, has suffered a steep decline, while New York City, at the other, has flourished, as though good fortune had flowed down along the L, draining Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica along the way.
Imagine a backward, rotated L, or a mirror image of a long-division tableau. Seen one way, it is a rural state, with a right-angled corridor of denser settlement and industry which more or less follows the course of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, from Manhattan to Lake Erie. The state is vast, by Eastern standards, and its cities are far-flung. New York State’s notorious resistance to efficient governance owes a lot to geography.
“I feel sometimes like I’m sinking into quicksand,” Spitzer says of life as governor.
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