Gov. George Pataki (R) Elected 1994, 3d term up Jan. 2007
Born:	June 24, 1945, Peekskill
Home:	Garrison
Education:	Yale U., B.A. 1967, Columbia U. Law Schl., J.D. 1970
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Libby)
Elected  Office:	Peekskill Mayor, 1982-84; NY Assembly, 1984-92; NY Senate, 1992-94.
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1970-89.
Office	State Capitol, Albany 12224, 518-474-8390; Web: www.state.ny.us.
Additional Info
Recent Articles · Office Election Results
More On New York
At A Glance · State Profile Almanac Home
Recent News Coverage
Search the CongressDaily, Hotline, House Race Hotline, National Journal and Technology Daily archives using the form below:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Update: November 30, 2005
On July 27, 2005, Republican Governor George Pataki announced he would not seek reelection in 2006.

George Pataki, the governor of New York who in 2005 was the nation's longest serving governor, was first elected in 1994. He grew up in Peekskill, a small industrial city on the Hudson in northern Westchester County, at the cusp of metropolitan New York City and Upstate New York. His father was the son of Hungarian immigrants, his mother is of Italian and Irish ancestry; his parents had a farm in Peekskill and built it into a business; those years are the primary subject of his autobiography Pataki. Pataki graduated from Yale and Columbia Law School, where he was an unabashed conservative in the late 1960s; he practiced law with a big Wall Street firm, then moved to a Westchester firm in 1974. In 1982, he was elected mayor of Peekskill; in 1984, he ran against an incumbent Democratic assemblyman and won. In 1992, after eight years as a member of a powerless minority, he challenged an incumbent Republican state senator and beat her by 558 votes. In the state Senate he chafed at the leadership of Nassau County's Ralph Marino and voted against the budget--an almost unheard of rebellion in lockstep-party-voting Albany. In all this he showed ambition, ruthlessness and a penchant for cutting government, but few were paying attention.

In 1993, the almost unknown Pataki began running for governor, taking on one of America's best-known politicians, Mario Cuomo. For all his national fame, and his feints at running for president in 1987 and 1991, Cuomo was in trouble in New York: he cut the top tax rates but also created other taxes and increased spending robustly; he claimed credit for a workfare program but tended to support the public employee unions. Pataki provided a clear contrast on the issues, and he also showed political skill. He got the support of Senator Alfonse D'Amato, fresh from re-election in 1992 and in control of the state Republican party apparatus. Pataki easily won the May 1994 convention and prevented a primary challenge and a Conservative Party candidacy. In the general election, Cuomo attacked Pataki for having raised taxes in Peekskill; Democrats charged that he was a puppet of D'Amato. Thomas Golisano, a Rochester businessman, was spending millions as an independent, advised by pro-Perot pollster Gordon Black; Perot endorsed him and polls showed him with 8%. But Golisano's share of the vote fell to 4%, and Cuomo got 45%, about where he was running in polls. Pataki won 49% of the vote, losing New York City 70%-28% but carrying the suburbs 54%-43% and Upstate 59%-32%.

As governor, Pataki showed determination and even ruthlessness in seeking his goals. After the election, he engineered a coup ousting Marino as Senate leader that was executed while the governor-elect was on vacation in Florida. Most legislation in New York is hammered out by three people: the governor, the Assembly speaker and the state Senate president. Other state legislators don't much matter. Party discipline is routinely followed; committees don't hold public hearings or markup sessions, and their chairmen can be fired by the leaders any time; most members can't offer amendments or get bills discharged from committees; legislation is typically written by the three leaders' staffers and then "jammed" through both houses without anyone reading it--and all this is enforced by the party leaders' control over expense and campaign funds. So Pataki moved suddenly from being a backbench legislator to being in the room for all the important negotiations with Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate President Joseph Bruno. Pataki proposed cuts in taxes and a standstill in spending and, after bruising negotiations with Silver, got much of what he wanted. Pataki signed the death penalty into law in March.

He spent much effort on a $1.75 billion environmental bond issue, citing his longtime admiration for Theodore Roosevelt and gathering support from business, labor and environmental groups. In early 1997 Pataki unveiled his welfare plan, cutting benefits to recipients who do not find work by 45% over four years; he called for a three-year phase out of the estate and gift taxes, which sent many affluent New Yorkers to Florida. Pataki's budgets in 1997 and 1998 had above-economic-growth spending increases; he established who was in control, however, by line-item-vetoing $1.6 billion from the legislature's budget in April 1998. All this left Pataki in strong shape for reelection in 1998. The Democratic nomination was won by New York City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, a competent and constructive veteran widely admired in knowledgeable circles. But he was scarcely known outside New York City, and never had a chance against the well-financed Pataki. Pataki won 54%-33%, with 8% for Golisano, running a third-party candidacy.

Over many years now as governor, Pataki has tacked this way and that, emphasizing new issues and taking different stands that put him at different places on the political spectrum. His description of his political philosophy leaves him plenty of room: "I believe in limited government, low taxes, a tough approach to crime. But I also believe in activist government. I'm not one of those laissez faire types." During his second term he moved mostly to the left. Starting in 1999 he proposed changing the Rockefeller drug laws, with their mandatory minimum sentences; in 2004, the legislature finally acted and reduced the sentence for some low-level first-time drug offenders to 8 to 20 years in prison, down from 15 years to life. In 2001 Pataki pushed through an expansion of children's health insurance, which covered 543,000 children. He pushed through innovative gun-control laws in 2000, including requiring ballistic fingerprinting of every gun sold. He signed a hate-crimes law and set up a DNA review commission in 2000, plus laws for tougher sentences for sex offenders.

Most of all, he courted the public employee unions. He met one of the major demands by signing in July 2000 a cost of living adjustment for public employee retiree pensions. In January 2002 he met with Dennis Rivera, head of 1199, the state's largest union, and negotiated an agreement to increase the pay of hospital employees. He signed a law allowing unionization of employees of new Indian casinos. He supported higher pensions for police and fire fighters who work 30 years, which were much appreciated by the Policemen's Benevolent Association, the United Firefighters Association and the Corrections Officers Benevolent Association. His support of teachers' pay increases was appreciated by the NEA New York and his pressure on Mayor Michael Bloomberg for a $1 billion teacher pay settlement impressed the United Federation of Teachers.

But Pataki's greatest asset in 2002 was his performance on and in the days after September 11. He worked around the clock, often making public appearances with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; they had had edgy relations in the past, but obviously bonded in the emergency. His job rating, already in the high 50s, soared much higher in fall 2001 and early 2002, and he established a closer connection with New York City, where he had won only 28% of the vote in 1994 and 33% in 1998. His call for a total of $54 billion of aid to the state--which included some Upstate projects--was off-putting to many in Washington, but was well-received by New York voters. Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson said Pataki's greatest asset in 2002 was the "Ground Zero" effect.

Nonetheless, two well-known Democrats ran for governor. One was Andrew Cuomo, son of the former governor and the HUD Secretary in the Clinton administration. The other was state Comptroller Carl McCall, a longtime insider in New York politics, who would be the first black major party nominee for governor. McCall stressed classic Democratic themes and highlighted his own rise from modest (though not impoverished, as he suggested) beginnings to high public office. McCall played an insider's game, Cuomo an outsider's game. McCall was endorsed by hundreds of Democratic politicians, including all four Democratic borough presidents, as well as NEA New York--though other big unions, courted by Pataki, stayed out of the Democratic primary. Cuomo campaigned with his wife, a daughter of Robert Kennedy, and had more celebrity; he led in polls in the spring. Cuomo avoided the Democratic state convention and instead got on the ballot by collecting petition signatures. But both candidates made serious mistakes in off-the-cuff comments. On a bus with reporters traveling from Buffalo to Utica, Cuomo in April 2002 denigrated Pataki's role on September 11. "He stood behind the leader. He held the leader's coat. He was a great assistant to the leader. But he was not a leader." McCall, speaking at a homeless youth shelter in New York in June, was asked about education aid to ex-convicts. "Just because you're an ex-offender, you should not be denied education aid. In fact, if you're an ex-offender, I think you ought to get preference." He tried to explain he had not meant what he said, but voters got the sense he was one of New York's far left Democrats.

Cuomo withdrew from the race on September 3, a week before the primary. McCall had passed him in the polls over the summer and, Cuomo said, the only way he could win was to wage a negative campaign that he didn't want to do. That left McCall with little money for the general election and Pataki quite a lot more--but Thomas Golisano had even more. He is the founder and CEO of Paychex, a payroll processing company; his fortune is estimated at $800 million. He had run in 1994 and 1998, winning 4% and 8% of the vote, much of it in and around his hometown of Rochester. Under New York's unique system, candidates can run for the nomination of more than one party, and Pataki ran for the Conservative and Independence party nominations as well as the Republican. Golisano was running for the Conservative nomination, which he was unlikely to win; he needed the Independence nomination to get on the ballot in November. Pataki operatives evidently encouraged people to re-register in the Independence party, to knock Golisano off the ballot on September 10. They nearly succeeded, but Golisano beat Pataki by a margin of only 9,572 to 9,026. Golisano, who had already spent $30 million, proceeded to spend $43 million more, most of it on ads savaging Pataki, calling him corrupt and saying that he had neglected the economy of Upstate New York. He succeeded in depressing Pataki's vote Upstate but Pataki ran better than he ever had in New York City, losing it to McCall by only a 53%-38% margin. Overall, Pataki won by a 49%-34% margin, with 14% for Golisano--not as sweeping a victory as in 1998.

Once reelected Pataki took a different tack on issues. He did press through the legislature in December a law banning discrimination against gays. But, with revenues slumping, he called for preserving previous tax cuts and said he opposed tax increases. In January 2003 he proposed a budget with cuts in spending on health care and education but suffered a stunning defeat in May when both the Democratic Assembly and Republican Senate overwhelmingly overrode his vetoes of their budget bills less than a day after he issued them; the legislature passed a budget which increased taxes and was $2 billion more than he proposed.

In January 2004, Pataki called for tougher anti-crime and terrorism laws and in February he joined five other governors on a surprise visit to Baghdad. He sought to cut taxes for manufacturers to help stem job losses, which were particularly acute in Upstate; one study reported that New York accounted for a higher rate of job loss in the recent economic downturn and accounted for one in 10 jobs lost in the nation. He saw one of the first bills he signed in 1995 to fulfill a campaign promise, a law to restore the death penalty, struck down by the state's highest court. After proposing a $90.8 billion budget in 2003, in 2004 he proposed a $99.8 billion budget that called for cutting back Medicaid spending by $800 million. For the 20th consecutive year the state missed its budget deadline as Pataki, Silver and Bruno, the only three that matter in New York's budget process, failed to come to agreement by the April 1 deadline. In July, a study by the Brennan Center for Justice confirmed what nearly everyone knew about the Albany culture: it ranked the state legislature as the least deliberative, most dysfunctional legislature in the nation, one of the most expensive to operate and one of the least productive. Responding to growing public criticism, the legislature passed a bill that lawmakers said would overhaul the budget process; Pataki vetoed it and the Senate decided not to override.

The Republican National Convention in New York City was a high point. Pataki took on a prominent role in the election campaign as a defender of George W. Bush's foreign policy and at the convention he had the slot to introduce Bush on the convention's final night. After the election, there were rumors that he might take a position in Bush's 2nd term Cabinet; he insisted he was not interested. "I don't want to go to Washington," he said. "I've never wanted to go to Washington. I would have gone to Washington four years ago if I wanted to go to Washington. I'm the governor and I hope to be governor for some time to come." But at home, he was the target of criticism from Republican Congressmen Peter King and John Sweeney who criticized the direction of the state party under Pataki's stewardship. The 2004 election was a dismal one for Republicans: they lost seats in the Assembly and Senate and were embarrassed by Senator Charles Schumer's landslide 71% reelection victory.

But Pataki won a victory in December 2004 when the state's highest court ruled that the governor has the sole authority to propose budgets and the legislature only has the power to delete or reduce expenditures or add spending subject to the governor's line-item veto; the ruling came in response to two lawsuits reaching back to the 1998 and 2001 budgets. He began 2005 by announcing an agreement with a Canadian paper manufacturer to protect from development more than 100,000 acres of forestland in the Sable Highlands area of the Adirondacks. He proposed a $105.5 billion budget, with $1 billion in Medicaid cuts to cover a projected budget deficit of $4.15 billion. This budget, for the first time in 21 years, was actually passed on time; it increased spending on education and transportation and raised taxes and fees on motor vehicles and mortgages.

Many in Albany believe Pataki will not run for reelection to a fourth term; there is speculation that after 10 years as governor he has ambitions for other office--perhaps a run for the Senate against Hillary Clinton, perhaps the vice presidency, maybe the presidency itself. In December 2004, he said he would not make any decisions about his future until after the next legislative session. Popular Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the Democratic frontrunner who got great publicity from using investigative powers under a vaguely phrased state law to restructure the investment banking business, said he was running; he led Pataki, whose approval ratings were low in 2005, by a large margin in a head-to-head poll. But in June Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi was said to be considering a challenge to Spitzer. On the Republican side, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, a New York native who now works for a private equity firm in the city, said he was seriously considering running if Pataki and Rudy Giuliani did not.

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent
2002 general	George Pataki (R-C)	2,262,255	49%
	Carl McCall (D-WF)	1,534,064	34%
	Thomas Golisano (Ind)	654,016	14%
	Other	128,743	3%
2002 primary	George Pataki (R)	unopposed
1998 general	George Pataki (R-C)	2,571,991	54%
	Peter F. Vallone (D-WF)	1,570,317	33%
	Thomas Golisano (Ind)	364,056	8%
	Other	228,872	5%
Prior winning percentages: 1994 (49%)