Gov. George Pataki and U.S. Senator Alfonse D'Amato are due for re- election next year. That's why there's a gigantic new public agency supplying electricity to the homes of politically potent Long Islanders. It hardly requires the mind of Oliver Stone to suggest that Mr. D'Amato and Mr. Pataki are waiting behind the scenes. Prepared to intervene not on one side or the other, but as blue-helmeted peacekeepers. They will enforce a truce, probably in the form of vacancy decontrol or a long phase-out of most regulations.
Rent regulation is the last, dying gasp of a certain sort of New York liberalism.
No doubt some of you would argue that, after all, you have a right to live in an apartment with sweeping views of the Hudson River. Continue to do so, and Mr. Bruno will put a picture of you on a poster and wave it on the floor of the State Senate, where men in plaid sports coats and women with blue eye shadow will cast their votes against you. In the great rent wars, the affluent are affected only insofar as it may be a bit more burdensome to carry the cost of the country home, private school, the parking garage and ski weekends in Colorado. Pro-regulators say such people will be priced out of Manhattan. Rent regulation is about the plight of these people.