I was amused to read that former candidate for Governor Tom Golisano plans to spend to money to challenge state legislators, because I wrote to him and recommended that he do exactly that nearly a decade ago, after his second run for office in the 1998 election. While I didn’t agree with everything Golisano had to say back then, he did seem to intuitively grasp what I was seeing in the data, and just four years into the reign of Pataki, Bruno and Silver, I could see it would be a disaster for the future of the state (the last couple of years of Cuomo weren’t so good either). So what to do? The only route to a fair deal for non-insiders, I decided, was for some third force that was not in on the deal in Albany to capture enough seats in the State Senate and Assembly to swing the selection of the leadership. (I would work in the House of Representatives too, I suggested).
Golisano never responded to my letter, or to a follow up letter. I have no idea if he ever saw them, or read them. When the Independence Party convention took place in Brooklyn in 2002, I took the time to go over and tell him personally what needed to be done. I also wrote to others with the same suggestions. Finally, with no one else willing to take on this self-serving mess we call a government, I decided to do it myself. The result, as my wife icily put it, was that rather than prove it wasn’t hopeless, I cost our family nine months of my income to prove that it was. Did Golisano finally figure out on his own what I had suggested a decade earlier? Or did my letter get stuck in a “to do when I am retired” file, along with buying a hockey team, as someone suggested to me last week?
Well I know more than I did a decade ago, of course. For one thing, back then I didn’t know Golisano’s Independence Party was the faction-ridden mess it is, or anything about any of the people involved. Just the facts of how our government compares with others, in taxes collected and services delivered — and the fact that the state government is primarily to blame. Today two of the three destroyers are gone, although it remains to be seen if their replacements are any better. In any event, so much damage has been done it will be very hard to reverse, even if there is an attempt to reverse it.
Still, better late than never. The politcal class and it’s interlocking beneficiaries has become a monolithic cabal that sits over us and leaves us no recourse. Someone has to challenge them, until they get around to eliminating most election altogheher.