State Sen. Malcolm Smith was never going to be mayor of New York City. But why would he let a little thing like that stand in the way of turning a buck off mayoral politics?
That is, off the city’s luxuriously funded public campaign-finance system.
Here’s how it could have worked, save for the intervention of US Attorney Preet Bharara.
Some months ago Smith, one of New York’s more dubious Democrats, intimated that he would run for mayor this year — as a Republican.
Oh, that Malcolm, the insiders scoffed. What a kidder.
But he wasn’t kidding.
And that got him indicted Tuesday — along with five others allegedly involved in a bizarre, breathtakingly arrogant corruption scheme.
Smith, a key member of the morally fraught coalition now running the state Senate, is well positioned to lavish tax dollars, if not directly on himself, at least on others.
And, according to Bharara’s complaint, that’s just what he tried to do — lubricate a corrupt upstate land-use scam with $500,000 in state money, while sloughing off sufficient cash to bribe his way onto this year’s mayoral ballot.
As subornation of democracy goes, it doesn’t get much more egregious.
But the ballot, not the office, was where Smith’s real opportunity lay. Running for office brings access to the city’s six-dollars-for-one, taxpayer-funded campaign-contribution-matching system.
Clearly Smith was in a position to deliver state money to others — see above, Bharara’s complaint — so why not use that influence to attract “contributions” from corrupt favor-seekers? Multiplied by the match, that would create a pot of cash that an imaginative fellow like Malcolm Smith would have no trouble putting to beneficial use.
But, as they say, always follow the money.
Certainly, the practiced casualness with which all this went down indicates that while Smith may sometimes act the fool, he isn’t delusional.
And it also indicates that publicly financed political campaigns are no panacea, even if they are foolishly touted as an elixir for New York’s loathsome political culture.
After all, isn’t Bharara also deeply involved in a probe of city Comptroller John C. Liu’s 2009 campaign fund-raising?
And while the history of public campaign finance in the city is studded with examples of skimming, scamming and related advantage-taking, there’s scant evidence that it has done anything to reduce corruption. Bharara’s latest charges, in fact, suggest precisely the opposite.
Nevertheless, this is the system Gov. Cuomo and others want to extend statewide — to reduce the influence of money in politics, we’re told, and to mitigate the power of incumbency.
“People in power abuse power and that’s part of the human condition,” Cuomo said of the Smith scandal yesterday.
True enough, but it’s pretty rich coming from a fellow who is fresh off engineering one of the most breathtaking abuses of power in memory — one that, ironically enough, involves the use of hundreds of millions of tax dollars to influence political outcomes and to further entrench New York’s barnacle-encrusted incumbentocracy.
This would be the set-aside of some $400 million in public funds to cover $350 “tax rebate” checks to go out to more than 1 million New Yorkers right before Election Day 2014 — when, serendipitously, Cuomo himself will top the ballot.
This works out to a publicly financed campaign contribution of roughly $1.9 million for every man, woman and unindicted co-conspirator now sitting in the Legislature.
And no matter how Cuomo’s cut is calculated, it’s certain to reduce Smith’s alleged larceny — no matter the senator’s motive — to a loose-change shakedown. Comparatively speaking, of course.
The difference, of course, is that what Cuomo & Co. did was perfectly legal — albeit fully reflective of the political culture from which Smith emerged.
It’s a hand-in-glove sort of thing.
Still, here’s what Cuomo had to say about Bharara’s exemplary complaint: “It is very, very troubling. We have zero tolerance for any violation of the public integrity.”
That, to put it mildly, remains to be seen.