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Skelos' effort to save GOP one for the ages

Rick Brand

June 29, 2008

When Dean Skelos first became deputy majority leader in 1994, his hair was still dark, and though in his mid-40s, he was considered the young blood in a club dominated by guys of retirement age.

After 14 long years as heir apparent, Skelos, now a silvery 60 himself, has been finally vaulted into leadership with a bit more than 100 days to craft a winning November strategy. The goal: to keep or enlarge Republicans' slim two-seat edge, with a majority whose average age is still far senior to him. Nineteen of the 32-member majority will be 60 before year's end, nine are more than 70.

This makes Skelos not an ingénue getting the big break because the star broke a leg. He's more like graying sitcom star Tony Danza trying to squeeze a few more performances out of a wheezing, long-running Broadway show. But if Skelos can pull it off, he should win a Tony as star of the Albany road company of "The Miracle Worker."

A loss could make another kind of history, Skelos becoming the shortest Senate majority leader this side of upstater Jotham Allds, thrown out after only 49 days in 1910 when it became known he accepted a $1,000 bribe to help kill a bill to regulate bridge construction.

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Skelos himself acknowledges, "it's a challenge," but says no other GOP incumbent beyond his predecessor, Joseph Bruno, 79, is departing and polls show all GOP lawmakers doing well. He said he expects to hold the two open seats and is targeting three Democratic incumbents and a "few sleepers," that he won't disclose.

Democrats meanwhile are taking aim at a half-dozen seats, including 36-year Senate veteran Caesar Trunzo, 82, of Brentwood, who is being challenged by Brookhaven Democratic Supervisor Brian Foley. They see the party's 2-million statewide voter edge in a high turnout presidential year with a public unhappy over gas prices, the Iraq war and President George W. Bush as their best chance ever to end the GOP's four-decade domination of the Senate. If Democrats win, they only have to hold on for two years as incumbents after which they would control reapportionment and cement their power for a decade or beyond.

But GOP experts say Skelos is their best hope for keeping control. "They are better off with Dean going into the election. It gives the party a credible and fresh face," said Bruce Blakeman, former Nassau Legislature presiding officer. "Dean is also a savvy politician and a tenacious campaigner. He knows how to win ... and how to pick up on issues and create new policy to which middle-class voters respond." Among those kind of issues is Megan's Law, requiring sex offenders to register with the state.

Others say Skelos re-energizes the GOP majority that has been battered by special election defeats and the ongoing federal probe of Bruno where the fallout is still uncertain. "This is a shot of adrenaline," said Rory Whelan, a longtime GOP Senate consultant.

While known for a hardball style, Skelos said it was his role as Bruno's deputy to "take on" Democrats. "I can be tenacious if I have to be ... I can be focused, I can be results-oriented. It doesn't mean I'm mean-spirited," he said.

But former state Sen. Carol Berman, who handed Skelos his only loss in 1982, said, "He's a nice man, but don't be taken in by his niceness." Berman beat Skelos, then an assemblyman, by tying him to former Nassau GOP chairman Joseph Margiotta, after Margiotta's federal mail fraud conviction, even though the Senate GOP redistricted her out of Queens making her seat far more Republican.

In a 1984 rematch, Berman, now 85, recalled, Republicans turned the tide by bringing in President Ronald Reagan to a Five Towns synagogue where the rabbi's wife made a chicken-liver bust of the president. "He [Skelos] will do what is best for his own side," she warned. "He knows where he's coming from and what he has to do."

THE ISSUE

Control of the State Senate

THE PLAYER

New GOP leader Dean Skelos

WHAT'S NEXT

Trying to maintain the majority