Pat Dollard

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Wall Street Journal:

In a year of political turbulence and upsets, the race for governor of New York was supposed to be a dull exception and a snap for Andrew Cuomo, the state’s Democratic attorney general.

That was before Carl Paladino, a tea party-backed developer from Buffalo, bulldozed an established Republican rival in the party’s primary and turned the contest into a brass-knuckled brawl.

Mr. Paladino has drawn notice from Newt Gingrich, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and other major Republican figures who previously had written him off.

“I think the politics in the state of New York is absolutely disgusting. I intend to show that to the people, how disgusting it can be,” he said in an interview.

In the past few weeks, Mr. Paladino, the 64-year-old son of working-class Italian immigrants, has broken just about every rule of political campaigning. He has spread rumors about Mr. Cuomo’s former marriage to Kerry Kennedy. He has accused important figures in Albany, the state capital, of being criminals, including Mr. Cuomo. In a fit of rage over news media scrutiny of his own family and an extramarital affair, he threatened to “take out” a reporter for the New York Post. After Mr. Cuomo declined his request for a debate, Mr. Paladino didn’t just repeat his demand—he accused him of lacking courage, using a more interesting word than courage. A poll this week found that the majority of voters say he’s a “loose cannon.”

Can Mr. Paladino win? The latest polls say he trails Mr. Cuomo by a double-digit margin.

John J. Flanagan, a Republican state senator from Long Island, said that isn’t the end of the story. “I think he has a chance to win,” Mr. Flanagan said. “I understand what the polls are saying, but there were a lot of people who thought he would never win the primary.”

Like other tea-party candidates, Mr. Paladino has benefited from growing frustration over the economy and Democratic control of government. But there are local factors at play, too. The political collapse of former governor Eliot Spitzer, and his successor, David A. Paterson, along with a spree of ethics scandals in the legislature, has turned voters against the establishment. Mr. Paladino’s jeremiads against taxes and spending have resonated in long-depressed upstate.

“Paladino’s campaign is operating on the thesis that the voters are sick and tired of the typical pre-packaged Albany career politician, and Andrew Cuomo fits right into the mold,” said Rob Ryan, a longtime Republican consultant who ran Gov. George Pataki’s 1994 campaign. “But there is a fine line between outrage and bloviating.”

In an interview, Mr. Cuomo said, “If you believe in dictatorships, vote for him.”

Mr. Paladino makes no apologies for his style. “People can see through this political correctness that Andrew is trying to define,” he said.

On policy, the candidates have little in common. Mr. Cuomo, the son of one of Democratic liberalism’s most ardent voices, former Gov. Mario. M. Cuomo, has campaigned as a centrist. He wants to hold the line on spending and taxes.

Mr. Paladino has called for a government retrenchment never contemplated by past governors. To deal with the state’s chronic deficits, he wants to cut spending by 20% and Medicaid funding, which at $52 billion is the highest in the nation, by 40%. He has promised to lower the personal income tax by 10%, eliminate agencies and shrink a state work force that has hovered for years around 200,000.

After a brief bout of indecision over how to confront Mr. Paladino, Mr. Cuomo has bared his claws. Democrats, under his aegis, released a poster grafting the Republican’s face onto the image of a hog.

The attorney general has labeled Mr. Paladino an extremist, drawing attention to racist emails he has forwarded to friends, to his stance against abortion and to a proposal to convert shuttered prisons into dormitories that would house welfare recipients conscripted into a mandatory-jobs program. He has activated a battalion of prominent Democrats, women’s groups, ethnic leaders and other surrogates to condemn the Republican.

Mr. Paladino, in turn, has questioned Mr. Cuomo’s record as the state’s top law enforcement officer, and as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the last term of the Clinton administration. He has cited Mr. Cuomo’s relationship with Andrew Farkas, a real estate investor who paid Mr. Cuomo $1.2 million in 2004 and 2005 for advising one of his companies.

As HUD secretary, Mr. Cuomo had accused another Farkas company, Insignia Financial Group, of paying kickbacks to building owners. Mr. Farkas’s company settled out of court with the Justice Department in 1997 and agreed to pay $7.4 million, without having to admit any wrongdoing or give up its HUD business.

Mr. Paladino says Mr. Cuomo let Mr. Farkas off easy, and that his dealings with Mr. Farkas amounted to a “bribe.” Messrs. Cuomo and Farkas, who serves as Mr. Cuomo’s campaign finance chairman and has been a major donor, have said they didn’t know each other at the time of the legal dispute and first met in 2002.

“Paladino is now rewriting history with a mud pen,” a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo’s campaign said.

A spokesperson for Mr. Farkas said, “Mr. Paladino’s allegation that Andrew Farkas, or any Farkas-related entity, ever paid Andrew Cuomo a ‘bribe’ is a pure fabrication. The chronology and sequence of events strictly preclude even the theoretical possibility of such a thing having taken place.”

Mr. Cuomo, like Mr. Paladino, acknowledges the personal toll of such a campaign. Asked how he is able to shield his family, he said, “You can’t. I don’t know how you could. That’s the price you pay for being in this business. I haven’t had a private life in 30 years.”