The punditry has gotten this one wrong for a long time. "Shelly's finished" has been half a prediction and half a secret wish in the political and journalism worlds for 20 years. His resurgence as a key figure in this year's budget negotiations are just the latest example of why it's not smart to write him off.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo's budget and the election of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have combined to reinvigorate Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's speakership. Rank-and-file Democrats do not want to walk away from the new mayor. They agree with him on taxing the wealthy to pay for prekindergarten, and are very unhappy about the proposed massive state tax cuts for the 1 percent.
You could almost feel the shift of eyes and ears to how Shelly would respond initially, and how he would position the Assembly between now and April 1. He didn't disappoint: When asked about refusing to pass home rule tax requests for upstate if de Blasio was denied a vote on his, he replied, "I'm not ready to blow up the state. Yet." Vintage Shelly. He's back in business.
You wouldn't have said so three months ago. He had not handled the Vito Lopez mess with much skill, and Cuomo liked nothing better than beating up a weak speaker and a disorganized Assembly. As usual the first ones to jump all over him were the liberal advocacy groups and editorial boards, the ones whose agenda he advances and who have benefited from the progressive policies he's protected from various governors. I'm talking about pre-K, gay marriage, environmental protection, tax-the-rich, women's rights, civil rights. Without Shelly, not much of that happens.
But he's never been good at projecting a favorable image for himself or the Assembly. A good part of that is his fault: Take a look at last week's well-intentioned debacle over academic freedom and Israel. Most of the disdain for Shelly and the Legislature is a kind of elitist displeasure with real politics and a dislike of legislatures generally. The liberal elite for the last decade have created the myth that the members were sheep and the Legislature was dysfunctional, as the Brennan Center put it in a 2004 report. There was and is plenty wrong with the Assembly, but it took the Washington, D.C. Tea Party to show the difference between slow and careless, and real dysfunction.
He's held on through all this because the Assembly rank and file members know that he is the best negotiator in town, he listens to the members, and he delivers on the things the Democratic Conference holds dear. With a tough, in-your-face governor like Cuomo moving to the right on economic policy, the Assembly and the left need his skills now more than ever.
That doesn't mean things will come out as the left and the Democrats want. Without a unified opposition to Cuomo's austerity/tea party tax cuts, Shelly doesn't have a lot of room to work. But the Democrats are back in his corner, de Blasio needs and likes him, and by gosh, he's in a position to do the dirty work and horse trading that representative democracy demands of a legislature. He's the best sausage-maker in the business, even if no one wants to applaud when he's in action.
Richard Brodsky is a fellow at the Demos think tank in New York City and at the Wagner School at New York University.