ALBANY (AP) -- What happened?
The 2010 campaign for governor of New York appeared to have all the right ingredients to allow democracy to break out: Energized voters, Albany's corruption and dysfunction at its height, a lingering recession compounded by the state's chronic overspending and overtaxing.
Instead, tea party Republican Carl Paladino has repeatedly strayed from his platform to cut taxes by 10 percent and spending by 20 percent, offering views about Democrat Andrew Cuomo that are impolitic, self-destructively honest or just plain dumb for a statewide politician in a blue state where polls show pocketbook issues are most important.
Paladino's mistakes and other comments were then countered with outsized outrage by Democrats that he's "unfit for office." Even Cuomo, whose campaign put out hundreds of pages of policy statements, has spent more time sniping with Paladino.
Democrats speaking for Cuomo and headlines refer to Paladino as "crazy Carl," while Paladino has questioned Cuomo's manhood, parenting skills and fidelity.
And that's exactly what each campaign wants voters to hear, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
"The irony around the country is - it's not just New York - we have an extraordinarily consequential election," said Jamieson, author of "Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy."
"The consultants are going to say, 'You put up your positive alternatives to this and you're going to lose,"' she said.
The antidotes to such campaigns are usually well-moderated debates. The first and apparently only debate in New York's governors' race will be Monday night, televised on cable TV statewide.
The media is also falling down this campaign year, when candidates were to be held accountable as rarely seen before, she said.
"The press ordinarily is a solution to this," she said. "But we've got a fragmented media environment and major news organizations so hunkered down that they are laying off instead of increasing staff."
Besides the loss of "deeply knowledgeable" beat writers, each campaign is treating daily public schedules like state secrets. They routinely provide too little time for political reporters in Albany to attend and presumably ask informed questions. Cuomo, the current attorney general, used surrogates for months in a strategy of avoiding direct confrontation with his opponent and now mostly stays away from Albany and its political reporters, except for one that Paladino claims is Cuomo's "stalking horse."
The respected NY1 TV news channel keeps a running clock on how long it's been since Cuomo agreed to appear on its nightly political show, a staple for all statewide politicians that has featured Paladino several times. So far, it's been more than 1,370 days.
"He has a strategy and he's proceeding with it," said political scientist Gerald Benjamin of the State University of New York at New Paltz. "Republicans are helping him by not mounting the kind of focused challenge that will allow them to define the discourse. Cuomo can be successful by allowing them to wake up in the morning and let them do what they do."
Benjamin noted Cuomo's response last week to Paladino's latest woes showed this carefully measured response. Paladino had called the bumping and grinding in "little Speedos" at the annual gay pride parade in Manhattan "disgusting." He said Cuomo "exposed his children to that nonsense of extremists of the Gay Pride Parade. Would you do that?"
Cuomo deflected the question, saying: "He's probably the last person I'd take advice from."
"We've created this bizarre system of campaigning in which any personal transgression signals that one is incapable of leading," Jamieson said. "When, actually, personal transgressions are largely irrelevant ... most of the sniping back and forth doesn't mean that the target was worthy, it simply means that the bullet worked."
State Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long said he expects the race will turn to substantive issues in its closing weeks.
"We can do without the personal attacks on either side," Long said. "If we don't do something, this state is going to continue to go into meltdown."
Republican Rick Lazio is out of what has become the nastiest race for governor in decades. He lost the GOP primary to Paladino and dropped the Conservative line to unify the two parties. Hours before he left the race Sept. 27, he was contemplative in his spartan Manhattan campaign office as he planned to publicly urge an end to mudslinging and a return to the issues.
"Winning at all costs, for either party, is not what America is all about," he told The Associated Press.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Michael Gormley is the Albany Capitol editor for The Associated Press and has covered New York politics for the AP for 10 years.
(Copyright ©2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
