A glossy red, white and blue pamphlet prepared by the State Democratic Committee arrived last week in thousands of New York City mailboxes. It carried a simple message: If George E. Pataki is elected Governor, "Your rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartment is history."
"When tenant protections are ended, how many minutes will your landlord wait to call?" the brochure went on. "And if you can't afford your new rent, how long will he give you to pack your bags?"
It is surely no accident that Election Day follows hard on the heels of Halloween. If they cannot get your attention, and elicit your support, by promising things, politicians these days are not reluctant to try to win your vote by scaring you to death.
With the New York State gubernatorial campaign in its final frenzy last week, supporters of State Senator Pataki, the Republican challenger, and of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, the Democrat seeking a fourth term, missed few opportunities to heighten - some might say exaggerate - the distinctions between the candidates. (The independent candidate, B. Thomas Golisano, missed few opportunities to dismiss them both.)
Even if seasonally adjusted for political hyperbold, these pictures are extremely grim.
If Mr. Pataki is elected, Cuomo supporters insist, his plans for a large income tax cut would cause state aid to cities and towns to dry up, resulting in huge increases in local taxes just to maintain services. They suggest, too, that he would favor upstate and suburban communities, where his political support is strongest, at the expense of New York City.
If Mr. Cuomo is re-elected, the Republicans say in turn, the state's - and the city's - economy will stagnate, businesses will flee, services will decline and crime rates will surge.
So, come Tuesday, how is a New Yorker to decide which candidate will best serve the city's interest? What is a New Yorker to do?
First, relax. However different Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Pataki may be on everything from tax policy to the death penalty, their campaigns' attempts to sharpen those dissimilarities ignore a fundamental fact: far from presiding over the state like an unfesttered despot, the Governor, any Governor, is checked constantly and significantly by the political realities of the State Legislature.
For years, the Democrats and Republicans have shared power in the Legislature, a fact of life that blunts the excesses of each party and tempers the ability of any Governor to carry out his agenda. (It is responsible, too, for the gridlock that frequently engulfs the State Capitol.)
Any promises being offered by Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Pataki -- as well as all those nightmare scenarios -- would likely be altered or blocked by the Democrats who control the Assembly or the Republicans who dominate the Senate.
Mr. Pataki, for instance, may have voted against the renewal of rent stabilization and rent control in 1989 and 1991, but he voted in favor in 1993 because the law was changed to eliminate the most expensive apartments. He has not indicated that as Governor he would seek to eliminate them. And even if he tried, the Assembly Democrats, most of whom are from New York City, would never let him succeed.
Similarly, if, as a Pataki television commercial has been suggesting, Mr. Cuomo were to try to pay back his new political friend, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican who surprisingly endorsed the Democratic Governor and reinvigorated his campaign two weeks ago, by funneling hundreds of millions of upstate and suburban dollars to New York City, the Senate Republicans would certainly rise up and defy him.
Still, while the candidates' most extreme promises or most alarming warnings are unlikely to come to pass, that hardly means that the Governor's race is without significance. Though the real differences between Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Pataki may often be on the margins -- matters of nuance, tone and attitude -- in the setting of public policy the margins do count. And the ultimate point may lie less in what a Governor can get enacted by a politically divided Legislature than simply in what he proposes.
"I think the tone a Governor sets is most important," said Nathan Leventhal, a former Deputy Mayor who is chairman of the Citizens Union, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. "Most services in New York are delivered by the local government. You look for the Governor to provide a real sense of policy direction, of goals that must be set but that may not be reached."
How, then, might the life of the average New Yorker -- or even of the city itself -- change as a result of this election? Will the outcome of the campaign determine, for example, whether the city receives more state education aid? New York has 37 percent of the state's students, but gets only 34.5 percent of the aid. Mr. Cuomo says that is unfair, while Mr. Pataki says he wants to study all state aid to the city, including for mass transit and social services. As always, the Legislature will make the final decision.
Indeed, only one thing is reasonably certain: those who commit capital crimes would fare less well under Mr. Pataki. He supports the death penalty, as does a majority of both the Senate and Assembly. Mr. Cuomo opposes the death penalty, and has vetoed it annually. (Of course, whether reinstituting capital punishment in New York would actually diminish crime, especially in a city where crime rates have been declining for three years, is a subject of endless debate.)
THE CASE FOR CUOMO
Mr. Cuomo has promised during the campaign to help New York City survive its continuing and severe fiscal problems. Foremost among his pledges is a proposal for the state to assume much of the city's cost of Medicaid, health care for the poor. The city spends more than $2 billion a year on Medicaid, picking up 25 percent of the cost. The state pays for an additional 25 percent, and the Federal Government assumes half of the bill.
New York is one of the few states that requires a city, as well as suburban and upstate counties, to pay any Medicaid costs. The burden on the local governments is immense. About $1 of every $16 spent by New York City goes to Medicaid, for example. A vivid measure of the scale of that expenditure is that $2 billion is more than the combined budgets of the Departments of Parks, Fire, Sanitation, Health and Cultural Affairs.
If the city's share of Medicaid were assumed by the state, it would virtually end the fiscal distress that New York has endured for five years. It would probably eliminate the need for Mr. Giuliani to slash even further at essential city services, from the schools to park maintenance to garbage pickups.
"Rudy Giuliani won't be able to deal with the structural deficit without help from Albany," said Esther Fuchs, a political science professor at Barnard College.
Nothing the Governor could do would more dramatically benefit the city, in the view of many elected officials and fiscal experts. But the promise is not new; Mr. Cuomo first pledged to assume the city's Medicaid burden in 1991. He has been blocked by the Senate, whose Republicans leaders have demanded containment of health care costs before they will consider allowing the state to assume the city's and counties' Medicaid burdens.
Even Mr. Cuomo's supporters say that if he is re-elected, he will be able to deliver on his Medicaid pledge only he is much more deft and bold in lobbying the Senate.
"There is some real reason to believe that, in getting elected to a fourth term, Mario Cuomo will exercise the combination of ingenuity and political skill that he possesses to find ways to get more of his agenda enacted into law than the Senate has allowed him to do in the last 12 years," said the Manhattan Borough President, Ruth W. Messinger, a Democrat who supports the Governor.
Ms. Messinger and other Democrats also note many ways that Mr. Cuomo could be helpful to the city, and to Mr. Giuliani, beyond money. These include relaxing state rules that mandate countless city actions and increase its operating costs, from how quickly the city must provide housing to the homeless to maximum caseloads for welfare caseworkers.
The Mayor could also get help from Mr. Cuomo on several of Mr. Giuliani's pet proposals, such as obtaining legislative approval for a restructuring of the city's Board of Education or getting the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose board the Governor controls, to go along with Mr. Giuliani's plan to merge the transit and housing police forces with the city's Police Department.
"The Mayor needs to have a very focused agenda," said Mitchell L. Moss, director of the Urban Research Center at New York University. "He has to know what he wants, and a lot of it has to be structural reform, not just cash."
THE CASE FOR PATAKI
The regional distinctions that have defined New York's statewide campaigns for decades have loomed large in this year's gubernatorial race. Mr. Cuomo's base support is in New York City, Mr. Pataki's is upstate and the suburbs are up for grabs.
Thus Mr. Cuomo, who is from Queens, has cultivated an image as a loyal protector of the city. Mr. Pataki, who is from Peekskill and still lives nearby in Garrison, has sometimes seemed to campaign against New York City, especially in the days since Mr. Giuliani crossed party lines to endorse the Governor.
But Mr. Pataki and his supporters also contend that the broad tax- and cost-cutting plan he has proposed for the state would benefit the city significantly. Mr. Pataki has called for slashing the state's personal income tax by about a third, or $5.6 billion, over four years, to stimulate business expansion and job growth.
Mr. Pataki has also proposed trimming the state's operating costs, by consolidating agencies and by restraining the growth in Medicaid spending, among other things. He has also said he would consider imposing time limits on welfare for able-bodied, childless adults.
Mr. Pataki, who has not provided comprehensive details on his tax plan, also generally favors relaxing state mandates on local governments, to help them cut costs. Mr. Pataki and his supporters say that if he can cut taxes, shrink the size of state government and ease the regulatory burden on businesses, he could generate an economic boom that would eventually produce more tax revenue for the city and state. And that, they say, would do more to help the city than almost anything else a Governor could do.
"I think the danger to New York City is: will the long-term stagnation of the state's economy harm the city?" said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a research group associated with centrist Democrats.
"I had a business person say to me, 'If Cuomo wins, I have to give up hope,' " Mr. Siegel said. "He's not going to leave the state, but if he has to expand, as he expects to, he's not going to do it here."
"What the Pataki tax plan offers to Giuliani is the tax cut that Giuliani can't afford to grant," Mr. Siegel said. "Giuliani is in a tight fiscal box. If Pataki can hold state spending to below the rate of inflation or the rate of growth in personal income, if he does that alone, it will have an enormous beneficial impact on the state economy."
Many Democrats have derided the Pataki plan, arguing that his fiscal methodology is seriously flawed. Mr. Cuomo and his supporters insist that deep state tax cuts would lead inevitably to huge gaps in the state budget, forcing reductions in state operations and drastic cuts in state aid to localities, including money for local schools.
Only about 30 percent of the state budget is actually spent on state operations, like prisons or highways; the rest flows back to cities, towns and counties. The Democrats contend that whatever money voters might save from Mr. Pataki's proposed income tax cut would ultimately be balanced by large increases in local property taxes.
But Mr. Siegel, like many Pataki supporters, dismisses the Democrats' assessment of the tax-reduction plan. "When I hear people say this," he says, "I think what they are saying is that things cannot change."
