Vaudeville is Back!

There’s liberal(ish), sophisticated New York City, which for all its many faults, does manage to keep up appearances for the most part. Then there’s Albany, our state capital, which does not. The latest escapades are ably illustrated by Wednesday’s New York Post page one picture of a clown. The paper even sent a clown upstate for photo-ops on the Senate lawn.

The jokesters responsible are two nominally Democratic state senators, Pedro Espada, Jr., and Hiram Montserrate, who conspired over recent weeks to switch their votes to the Republicans thereby throwing control of the upper house back to them—after only five months of Democratic domination. And they didn’t disappoint the Post yesterday, as Espada led a horde of reporters down the stately Greek-temple halls holding a key aloft after his erstwhile Democratic colleagues locked up the Senate chamber and turned off the lights.

Governor what’s-his-name weighed in with his usual commanding presence by lamenting the loss of working time to the state’s army of lobbyists. You can’t make this stuff up.

The two turncoats don’t have much to lose. Montserrate is facing charges for slashing his girlfriend’s face with a broken bottle, and Espada is being investigated by the state attorney general for siphoning state money into a highly dubious nonprofit. These are the two guys currently determining our state government’s future. According to the New York Times, Espada was pissed because the new Senate leadership wouldn’t continue its prior complicity with this legal milking of the public purse.

Not that ousted majority leader Malcolm Smith won any awards for competence during his five-month tenure. The Times also reported that Smith alienated a major donor and one of the main backers of the Democrats’ November 2008 takeover by blackberrying in front of him during a meeting. The story rings true given Smith’s narcissistic crowing about his modest origins and personal triumph upon reaching the top spot—sort of a mini-Roland Burris.

Given the notoriously gridlocked and feudal atmosphere in Albany, in which three guys in a room divvy up the pie and make all the important decisions, it was probably inevitable that the departure of one of them, former Republican majority leader Joe Bruno, eventually would prompt a back-alley knife-fight of this sort.

In addition, the whole spectacle prompts speculation about what would have happened had Smith and the Democrats not bowed to pressure from other dissident members of their raggedy party when the job assignments were passed out last fall. At that time, some Bronx Democrats threatened to bolt to the Republican side if they didn’t get everything they wanted, and Smith gave in on most of it.

Of course, that would have entailed a game of chicken in which the Democrats risked losing control of the chamber. But if open rebellion hadn’t been rewarded then, perhaps this latest display wouldn’t have got off the ground.

Hard to say where it will all shake out, and disdain for the state legislature is nothing new in New York. Most of the pols will be duly reelected anyway, and people will go back to grumbling about Albany dysfunction.

But if our total loser governor thought he had a chance for a comeback in 2010, this episode is a pretty good sign that he’s dreaming.