The Sun [1] reports today on rumors that Malcolm Smith might not necessarily become majority leader when the Democrats take the state Senate. We've heard rumblings [2] to this effect for a while now, though of course nobody's willing to go on the record about it. The Sun's article highlights Bronx Sen. Jeff Klein as a possible replacement for Smith, which isn't surprising, given Klein's fundraising abilities and his effort to win the minority leader post last year. Klein denied any interest in a challenge, but take that for what you will.

According to the Sun, two things in particular may be undermining Smith's position:

[Democratic Senators] question Smith's decision to speak openly about his plans to lure various Senate Republicans to switch parties. No Republican this year has flipped, making Mr. Smith's threat seem premature and empty.

Mr. Smith was also criticized for initially agreeing to support a legislative pay raise bill proposed by Senate Republicans. The move infuriated both the governor and some of Mr. Smith's colleagues, particularly the marginal members, who did not want their names to be attached to the bill.

Under orders from Mr. Spitzer, Mr. Smith ended up opposing and ultimately derailing the pay raise measure, angering Assembly Democrats and Senate Republicans who lost their ability to override the governor.

I'm skeptical [3] of the value of flipping Republican Senators into the Democratic column when there seem to be plenty of opportunities to beat them outright, but one can understand the temptation -- and I'm not sure that the window has necessarily passed. If Smith works with Spitzer to engineer a couple of flips, it would undoubtedly strengthen his position.

The pay raise issue is another example of the current difficulty of untangling the issue of executive power from the question of reform. Smith hasn't done badly from a reformist standpoint, promising to run the Senate differently when he's in charge, and siding with Spitzer in the Comptroller fight [4]. The other side of this, of course, is that his opponents in the legislature can simply accuse him of doing the politically expedient thing by aligning himself with the governor. Meanwhile, as we've noted, the majority in each house of the legislature has been using superficially valid concerns about executive power as cover to oppose a serious reform agenda.

What's nice is how, to a significant extent, Spitzer has found a way to make the reform position politically expedient, at least for Senate Democrats. Will this continue to be the case when Democrats take control of the chamber? And does the answer to that question depend on who leads the Democratic caucus after the takeover?

All the more reason, it seems, for progressives to have a clear set of policy demands of our own to push when the change comes -- the better to insulate ourselves from the uncertainties of personality politics.

Cross-posted at The Albany Project [5].

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