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ALBANY — Few second dates have been so awkward.
Like an eager and earnest suitor, Gov. Eliot Spitzer spent much of his second State of the State address wooing and praising lawmakers, with particular emphasis on Senate Republicans, his most bitter adversaries in Albany. Like haughty coquettes, the Republicans spurned him.
They smirked. They rolled their eyes. They grunted dismissively. And though Mr. Spitzer’s speech on Wednesday sprouted more olive branches than a Tuscan hillside, Republican senators and Assembly members mostly sat on their hands.
Not even the governor’s conspicuous and deliberate praise of individual Republican lawmakers could ease the chill in the air. When Mr. Spitzer singled out Senator George D. Maziarz, an upstate Republican, for his efforts on a landmark worker’s compensation overhaul last year, Mr. Maziarz’s fellow Republicans cheered ironically, and lightly needled him.
“There goes your re-election!” one yelled out. (Mr. Spitzer tried to lighten the mood. “Sorry, George,” he said, to laughter.)
Though Democrats in the Legislature have also had strained relations with Mr. Spitzer, some were disheartened by the Republicans’ frostiness.
“My first State of the State, and this is what I got treated to,” said Senator Craig M. Johnson, a Long Island Democrat elected last February in a special election. “I remember Bill Clinton’s State of the Union in the middle of impeachment, and even then, whenever there was a remark about a genuine bipartisan accomplishment, they would at least clap for that.”
In all, Mr. Spitzer’s speech drew applause some 100 times. But almost all of those were ovations led by, and dominated by, Democrats.
In interviews before the address, Republicans said there had been no plan, unofficial or official, to snub Mr. Spitzer.
“The ones we philosophically like, we’ll clap for,” one Republican senator, Martin J. Golden, said Wednesday morning. “The ones we philosophically oppose, we won’t clap for.”
But it did not quite turn out that way. Proposals that seemed deliberately aimed at Republican ears drew little response. Among the Republican senators, eyebrows remained cocked in skepticism and lips curled into smirks.
Protecting children from sexual predators? Eh. Manpower from the state police to aid local enforcement? Big deal. New flagship schools for biotech research in Republican-dominated Long Island and western New York? Yawn.
Even Mr. Spitzer’s most deliberate and tantalizing offer — a possible cap on local property taxes — earned only a faint ripple of applause from the Republicans. Assembly Republicans barely stirred, though they had urged Mr. Spitzer in recent days to make such a proposal, with some draping baseball hats emblazoned with the words “Tax Cap” over their nameplates during the address. One Republican senator shook his head slightly, as if in disbelief. Another rolled his eyes.
Only when Mr. Spitzer proposed a huge $1 billion “revitalization fund” to aid the upstate economy did the Legislature’s Republicans show evident appreciation.
David A. Paterson, Mr. Spitzer’s lieutenant governor, acknowledged the hostility but said he thought it could eventually be overcome.
“I think a couple of people are upset about a few things, but as the session goes on, if we keep working and reaching out the way the governor did today, it will end with the same thunderous applause that greeted the last State of the State,” Mr. Paterson said.
Still, there were lingering signs of resentment even among Mr. Spitzer’s fellow Democrats in the Legislature. The biggest cheer of the day, it turned out, did not go to Mr. Spitzer, the state Democrats’ titular leader. Instead, it went to Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, whom Assembly Democrats installed last winter over Mr. Spitzer’s objection.
In a news conference following the address, however, Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, heaped praise on Mr. Spitzer, even signaling openness to the property tax cap, a measure of which he has been skeptical in the past. The governor, Mr. Silver said, had been “nonpartisan in terms of mentioning” members of the Legislature in the speech.
Reminded that Mr. Spitzer had done much the same in his State of the State speech last year, Mr. Silver gave a little smile.
“I think follow-through is important,” he said.
