COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Voter anger can’t beat incumbency
According to the latest poll, there are millions of Howard Beales in Western New York and across the state, all mad as hell at the State Senate and vowing not to take it anymore.
Until the next election.
That’s when the smart money says there’ll be barely a nick in the near-100 percent re-election rate that characterizes democracy in the great state of New York.
This despite the new Siena Research Institute survey showing an electorate so fed up after the monthlong Senate stalemate that a 63-24 percent majority—the poll’s largest ever—thinks New York is headed in the wrong direction.
That might mean trouble if the election were held today. Or if it had been held last Friday, when Senate “leaders” came to Buffalo to raise campaign money while getting heckled by protesters.
But the election is more than a year away. What are the odds that people who can’t name their own representatives and have no idea how big the state budget is will still be mad by then?
Sure, there will be reminders of Sens. Bill Stachowski and Antoine Thompson scurrying into the fundraiser behind a black curtain, with the police commissioner there to make sure nobody tried to make a citizen’s arrest. But by next year, who will care?.
“A lot of public indignation . . . is transitory,” says James E. Campbell, chairman of the University at Buffalo’s department of political science, “unless there’s an individual that can be identified as being the target that can cause the anger to congeal.”
Exhibit A in that type of scenario was George W. Bush, who became the embodiment of bad government while helping Democrats take over Washington.
The problem for New Yorkers is that there’s no such public face on the State Senate.
In fact, there’s no face at all. Despite massive media coverage of the shutdown, majorities of voters don’t know any of the culprits.
Senate President Malcolm Smith, who fiddled with his Blackberry while rich guy Tom Golisano burned?
Fifty-six percent in the Siena poll couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, despite the fact that his snub helped spark the coup.
Majority Leader Pedro Espada, whose Democratic principles turned Republican before turning back Democratic again, depending on who offered the best job?
Fifty-four percent don’t know him.
Dean Skelos, John Sampson and Hiram Monserrate, the other key players?
They evoke similar blank stares. As a whole, they’re the most expensive bunch of nameless, faceless bureaucrats any taxpayer ever funded. It’s unlikely any one of them could be the galvanizing focus of a voter revolt. Despite their notoriety, their anonymity may be their salvation.
Add the fact that a voter doesn’t pick the entire Senate, just one member, and the prospects for change look even bleaker. Campbell notes that voters tend to say “the whole group is a bunch of bums” while exempting their representative.
If that holds true in district after district, we’ll get the same bunch of bums no matter how much anger there is.
Toss in what Campbell calls a tendency for disenchanted voters to turn away from politics and focus on things they have control over, and the prospects for revolt seem even bleaker.
In other words, despite all of the protests at “tea parties,” re-election will be a piece of cake.
Or to quote that other famous political scientist, Macbeth, the anger reflected in the Siena poll will amount to little more than “sound and fury signifying nothing.”
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