Albanys awake alright but not the way we would like to see it awake, they are still asleep at the reform switch and don’t be fooled by these measly reforms they like to call substantial. They are merely just steps in the right direction with many huge steps to go if we are ever going to see New York turn around. And we are at a standstill till Bruno and Silver are gone.

Awake? Ya, maybe, awake to the plans on how to thwart Spitzers and leave us in the dust. Time for new leadership.

Spitzer: Setbacks, yes, but Albany is now awake

ALBANY - Rookie Gov. Eliot Spitzer acknowledges he’s suffered some setbacks during his first 100 days in office and, sure, there are some words he’d like to take back.

But the big picture, he says, is this: he has made gains on some long-stalemated issues and has woken up a sleepy state government.

“There’s been no lack of activity. That is the fundamental transition,” the Democrat said during a pause amid his statewide tour to promote the $120.9 billion budget. “There has been a drumbeat for creative thinking and solutions. … There has been fervent debate and activity. You might say that’s in contrast to” the final years of Gov. George Pataki’s administration.

During his first 100 days in office, a traditional milepost for new executives, Spitzer made significant breakthroughs on new laws on workers’ compensation, ethics and civil confinement of dangerous sex offenders. He’s appointed two judges to the state’s top court. He spearheaded an upset victory for a Democrat in a special Senate election on Long Island.

And he’s had stumbles. He tried to influence the selection of a new state comptroller, only to see fellow Democrats in the state Assembly renege on a promise about the process and fill the vacancy with one of their own. He took lumps from good-government groups when he took budget negotiations behind closed doors and compelled rank-and-file legislators to vote on the deal with almost no time to study it.

He took on some sacred cows in funding for Medicaid and schools. Although he won some changes in both areas, critics say the victories will only last till next year. And, in the meantime, his popularity among New Yorkers dipped.

Assessments of the new governor vary. And they orbit around the high expectations the governor himself set and two memorable phrases.

Spitzer promised during that campaign that if elected, everything would change “on Day 1.” In January, during a dust-up with the Assembly minority leader, he said, “Listen, I’m a (expletive) steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else.” Those word choices set high expectations and, at times, have been thrown back in the governor’s face.

“He certainly has not matched the limits of his rhetoric in January,” said State University of New York at Cortland political scientist Robert Spitzer, who is no relation to the governor. Everything hasn’t changed, he said. Further, the budget compromises revealed that being governor “is not the kind of job you can do with a steamroller.”

Still, the wins outweigh the losses, he said.

“I think he’s logged important achievements in his first 100 days,” the political scientist said. “On the major goals he set out, he has some major accomplishments.”

The governor should get high marks for “where he ended up” after 100 days, said SUNY New Paltz dean and longtime political observer Gerald Benjamin. He said marking “winners” and “losers” in the budget fight - Senate Republicans defied Spitzer and added about $1 billion in spending - was the broadest way to measure things.

“I think he’s genuinely trying to advance effective government and he’s having some success,” Benjamin said. “Overall, he’s brought energy. He’s put a number of good people in place. He’s interested in policy to a refreshing degree … and he’s taken on some fights that needed to be taken on, like health care.”

Not all agree.

Doug Muzzio, a political science professor at Baruch College, said Spitzer “panicked” when faced with missing the April 1 budget deadline and compromised too much. He said the closed-door negotiations and slam-bam voting “was as opaque and Byzantine and dysfunctional as we’ve seen over the last 20 years.”

“It hasn’t been as productive as the 69, 70 percent of the people who voted for him expected,” Muzzio said, referring to Spitzer’s record-setting landslide win in November. “It’s not a very impressive performance for the steamroller. I just don’t understand it. … Maybe it’s my personal disappointment affecting my analysis.”

But for all the talk of “the steamroller,” that’s not always how Spitzer has operated.

Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco, R-Schenectady - the one on the receiving end of the “steamroller” remark - said the governor effectively steered the four legislative leaders through a seven-hour bargaining session that covered about 60 issues.

“He guided us well. He worked compromises,” Tedisco said. (The Republican thinks Spitzer had a “very productive” first 75 days and a “diminished” next 25, when the Legislature significantly altered parts of the budget.)

Similarly, Ken Adams, president of the New York State Business Council, said the governor was no steamroller - he means that in a good way - when it came to hammering out a compromise between business and labor on a new workers’ compensation law.

Spitzer conveyed “an imperative to get it done,” then delegated bargaining authority to two top aides.

“He clearly empowered them to lead negotiations. When it was necessary, he would intervene but he wasn’t micro-managing the process,” Adams said. “They forced partisanship and ideology out of the room. They brought in an outside actuarial firm to build a database. … All the sides had the info. There was no back-channel nonsense.”

In the end, business agreed to higher weekly payments to injured workers in exchange for ending the practice of lifetime payments to partially injured workers. That marked the end of a debate that had stagnated for years.

“To me, that suggests the governor has a variety of strategies to get things done,” Adams said.

For his part, the governor said he could not think “of one major policy” area in which he failed to score some victory. He admits he set very high expectations, but did so intentionally.

“I’d rather be working harder to meet expectations,” Spitzer said. “The problem of state government has been one of lower expectations and stagnation.”

Asked if he’d like to redo anything in the first three months or take back some of his words, the Democrat said: “The answer is yes, but I won’t tell you what. You learn more from your mistakes than your victories. Of course, I’m learning, but I’m happy about where things are.”