The headline over this morning's piece in Crain's really should read Abandon All Hope. It deals, of course, with the contentious state of affairs in the state capital and the expectations the citizenry might make of the forlorn place in terms of actual work on their behalf. It was ever thus.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer abandoned his controversial plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants in order to focus on his larger agenda, but Albany insiders say it's still unlikely that he will accomplish much in the coming months.

Mr. Spitzer's priorities include a slew of bills that piled up when discord shut down the capital in June. Since then, declining public and political support for the governor, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno's animosity toward him, have dashed hopes for major progress.

"In all of my years in Albany--28 years in the Legislature--I've never seen the environment as contentious politically as it is, and obviously that is going to make things very difficult," says Steven Sanders, a lobbyist and a former assemblyman from Manhattan. "The issues are difficult enough."

Adds Laura Haight, an environmental lobbyist with the New York Public Interest Research Group, "It's toxic."

Well, of course. Albany does not work well for this state, even as it works very well for those at the public trough. Like, say, Joe Bruno.

Eliot Spitzer walked into this pit of graft, legal and otherwise, in January with a crushing mandate; and ever since, the stakeholders of the status quo have worked hard to make sure that this agenda goes nowhere.

Eliot Spitzer is not the problem in Albany. Albany is the problem in Albany.

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