https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/nyregion/07lasher.html
Bloomberg’s Man in Albany Is Young but Seasoned
ALBANY — Just when Micah C. Lasher thought it was safe to finally sleep one recent morning, three words appeared in his in-box: “It’s a sham.”
Mr. Lasher had stayed up all night helping write a bill to increase the number of charter schools in New York, a cornerstone of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda. But amid the frenzy, a highly contentious provision had slipped by him: the State University of New York would lose its power to approve charter schools.
Charter advocates, including the one who had complained via e-mail, were seething. Mr. Lasher raced to the State Capitol, and in a feverish two hours of speed-dialing, helped to broker an agreement among lawmakers, the governor and the mayor to restore the university’s role.
An hour later, the Assembly passed the bill.
“The adrenaline was pumping,” Mr. Lasher said. “This needed to be nipped in the bud immediately.”
As Mr. Bloomberg’s chief negotiator, Mr. Lasher, 28, is the wrinkle-free face of City Hall, balancing the roles of bulldog, policy wonk and peacemaker for a mayor who is not shy about comparing lawmakers to lunatics.
“He can go to war with you on Monday and break bread with you on Tuesday,” Austin Shafran, a spokesman for the Senate Democrats, said of Mr. Lasher.
In an office near the State Capitol, Mr. Lasher and eight staff members scrutinize every significant piece of paper floating through the Legislature.
They assemble color-coded memos — yellow to support, pink to oppose — on topics like playground equipment and workplace harassment.
Then there is the politicking. On a recent day, just when Mr. Lasher thought that a long-shot effort to eliminate seniority protection for teachers was slowly picking up support, his BlackBerry hummed with news: two lawmakers were having second thoughts.
“Are you kidding me?” he repeated in disbelief, adding an expletive the second time, even though the bill’s chances of passing were slim.
While Mr. Lasher is praised as an honest dealmaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of policy, some lawmakers, particularly those critical of Mr. Bloomberg, say his intensity can be stifling.
“He can be a real nag,” said Kevin Sheekey, who, when he served as deputy mayor, had hired Mr. Lasher. “He’s constantly pushing. That’s very helpful in the job.”
Mr. Lasher, still plump-cheeked and bright-eyed, has yet to get a driver’s license. Despite his age, however, he has built an impressive résumé. He was a secret weapon to Manhattan politicians as a teenager, and in college he created a powerhouse consulting firm.
As a child growing up in the Upper West Side, he made a name for himself as a magician. He performed tricks like the Ambitious Coin, in which a half-dollar vanishes, on NBC’s “Today” show. And by age 14, he had published a 224-page book of tricks.
The youngest member of a neighborhood club of Democrats, he was responsible for cleaning out the clubhouse. Elected officials, taken aback by his zeal and shrewd mind, were soon approaching him for advice.
“He demonstrated to me more political acumen than people who spent a lifetime in this business,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president and a former assemblyman, who relied on Mr. Lasher as an informal adviser when he was 17.
The prodigy loved winning, and he became so emotionally attached to his candidates that after one of them, Deborah Glick, lost a race for Manhattan borough president in 1997, he retreated to a corner of a West Village restaurant and cried.
He developed his political muscles at Stuyvesant High School, where he warred with school administrators as editor of the student paper, The Spectator.
A long-simmering conflict escalated when he published an April Fool’s edition that mocked teachers and criticized seniority rules. The school promptly shut down the paper.
What followed was a classic Lasher crusade: an all-consuming campaign to restore free speech. Mr. Lasher and his allies flooded the school with fliers and petitions, forcing the administration to eventually give in.
Amid Stuyvesant’s overachievers, Mr. Lasher was no star student. He enrolled at New York University, where in the wee hours of the morning he built a political consulting firm.
The result was SKDKnickerbocker, now one of the city’s most prominent firms, which created fliers for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and counts among its clients 1199/S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East.
At Knickerbocker, he helped manage 76 campaigns — roughly three-quarters of them successful — and practiced a distinct brand of politics: cunning, idealistic and fiercely competitive. But his ardor has sometimes gotten him into trouble.
In 2001, when he was 19, Mr. Lasher helped design a now-infamous handout leaflet that contributed to the downfall of Mark Green, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor. The handout included a controversial New York Post cartoon that graphically depicted Mr. Green’s rival, Fernando Ferrer, kissing up to the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr. Green won the nomination, but with the party not united behind him, he narrowly lost the election to Mr. Bloomberg.
In an interview, Mr. Lasher described the episode as “something that I deeply regret being a part of,” emphasizing his inexperience at the time.
Mr. Lasher likes to say he has picked candidates he believed in, and aside from Mr. Bloomberg, they were all Democrats.
He is a devout liberal who winced at the mayor’s effort to change term limits to allow himself to run for a third term, friends say.
But last year, when Mr. Sheekey invited him to join the mayor’s Department of Education and help make it more politically astute, Mr. Lasher accepted.
Last summer, he coordinated the successful effort to have the Legislature renew mayoral authority over the city’s public schools.
Mr. Lasher enjoyed working at the Department of Education so much that he three times turned down an offer to become director of state legislative affairs.
“He was really pushed into the job,” said Mr. Sheekey, who is an executive at Bloomberg L.P. “This is an office that is more important than any single city commissioner.”
In Albany, Mr. Lasher has become a master multitasker. His recent duties have included finding ways to entice television crews to film in New York and resolving a dispute between Apple and legislators over how it sells its iPad.
Mr. Lasher has worked hard to counterbalance his boss’s sharp tongue. When he learned in April that the mayor was planning to denounce a proposal to cut property taxes as “craziness,” Mr. Lasher was instantly on the phone with Senate Democrats, who had championed the idea, taking the heat.
“The mayor can be a little harsh,” said Assemblyman David I. Weprin, a Democrat who represents eastern Queens. “You really want someone in the position who can smooth things over.”
Mr. Lasher’s quick rise has fed rumors that he may be gearing up for a political race of his own. He had hoped to run for the City Council in 2009, but he abandoned his plans after term limits were extended.
Now, Mr. Lasher says he has made no definite decisions about his future, though he has not ruled out vying for a Council seat in 2013.
“Do I want to succeed and do interesting things and continue to take on more responsibility? Absolutely,” he said. “Do I have some grand plan for what that’s going to look like? Absolutely not.”
For now, Albany beckons. The budget is two months overdue, summer is approaching and the mayor is fuming. Whether a young political wizard can emerge as an effective ambassador for a city of eight million remains to be seen.
“The chick just hatched,” State Senator Bill Perkins of Harlem said. “Let’s see what happens when it becomes a real rooster.”
An article on Monday about Micah C. Lasher, the chief negotiator in Albany for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, referred imprecisely to the controversial use of a cartoon by the mayoral campaign of Mark Green in 2001. While the cartoon, depicting Fernando Ferrer and Al Sharpton, was reprinted in a handout leaflet that Mr. Lasher helped design, it was not part of an advertisement for television or for a print publication.
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