The dustbin of history

Funny thing about legacies, in order to leave one you have to have done something.
There is no gray area for a legacy, it’s black or white.

For good or for bad, most people have already made up their minds about President Bush.

His remaining time as a lame duck in the Oval Office has left him more as a sitting duck.

But we’re not here to pass judgment on the president; we’ll leave that for history. He has already accomplished his mission – and we can all agree to disagree on what that was.

Come November, either (likely) presidential candidate John McCain or Barack Obama will be in the position of having to prove himself during his four years in the nation’s highest office. Will McCain just be known as the oldest man ever elected president? Will Obama just be known as the first black president, Bill Clinton’s label aside?

History has a funny way of turning important people into mere factoids, served up as a means to win money on game shows.

Grover Cleveland’s years in office of doing good things are trivialized; he becomes known as the only president to have served two non-consecutive terms in office. However, turn a few more pages in the history book and you’ll see he is credited with helping create the first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission.

You’ll also learn he was pro-business, but wasn’t a friend of the working man. When workers struck the Pullman Palace Car Co. after their wages were cut, Cleveland sent federal troops to quash the strike.

Some politicians promise great things, but fail on a moral level, leaving their legacy the butt of late-night talk show jokes. Eliot Spitzer came on like a steamroller in his inaugural address as governor in January 2007. But he soon learned that what worked as state attorney general, didn’t play in the backroom politics of Albany. In his State of the State address earlier this year, he tempered his remarks and struck a conciliatory tone. He wanted to rein in the high cost of living and doing business in this state. He created a commission to study ways of achieving tax relief. He wanted to help upstate dig out of their economically depressed graves. He wanted to create a $400 million Housing Opportunity Fund that would provide money for homes to teachers and police. He wanted to fast-track the construction of power plants to reduce energy costs.

All that was for naught, for a month later he was done in by his proclivity for having sex with high-priced call girls.

Thrust from his comfortable spot as lieutenant governor, David Paterson now is faced with leaving a legacy that is more than just being known as the first black governor of New York.
He first had to wait for the curtain to fall on his own public morality play, which included relationships with other women, before he could get to the business at hand. Last week, after receiving a preliminary report from the aforementioned property tax relief commission, Paterson said he plans to introduce school property tax cap legislation. However, Yonkers will once again get the short end of the stick since his cap would apply to all school districts outside the Big Five cities. Perhaps he should rethink his plan before submitting his bill.

Yonkers, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Middletown and Kingston face challenges similar to the upstate cities that are at the top of the state’s economic development list. As we have preached, the upstate-downstate dichotomy must be put to rest.

Treat the state as a whole, not some patchwork of indifferent, independent political sociology.

The commission’s report included some unsavory facts long known in this state: local taxes are the highest in America, 79 percent above the national average. Property tax levies are rising at more than twice the rate of inflation and salary growth. And of course Westchester and Rockland counties have the ignoble distinction of being in the nation’s top 10 in terms of amount of taxes per household.

And speaking of Westchester and legacies, how will County Executive Andy Spano fare in the harsh spotlight of history. One of the top county execs? A politician who brings new meaning to the term “nanny state”? You know, those laws that include banning the sale of mercury thermometers, telling restaurants not to use trans-fats and yet keeping that lawsuit-magnet, Playland, on the county-owned property rolls.

Someone who put quality of life issues ahead of tax cuts? Again, the county has one of the highest property taxes in the nation.

A man who loves his junkets to China?

We pick on Spano since he has been elected three times to the office of county executive.

Maybe he will take note of the tax cap legislation. Better yet, maybe he will push to have Yonkers included in the bill.

Back to those legacies. They must be more substantive than race, religion, gender or age.

What will it be gentlemen? Life in full or an empty suit?

top of page