NY Press Corps’ Water Cooler Moment on Andrew Cuomo
“I don’t know what Barak Obama’s worldview is …” Charlie Rose’s calm tenor voice trailed off as he chatted academically with Tom Brokaw.
“No,” affirmed Brokaw in response.
The two media moguls were reflecting on the 2008 presidential race on the eve of Obama’s election and confessed that, to their astonishment, they knew far too little about the presidential front runner. The scene was a rare public water cooler moment for the national press corps. It was as if a pair of executive managers from the Ministry of Truth met up in the break room one day, set down the pails of water they’d been toting, and finally thought to comment to one another, “Geez all this water is heavy. You think we should be carrying so much?”
Maggie Haberman at Politico reported on a similar water cooler moment for the NY press corps last Thursday regarding New York Democrat gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo. She pointed out that with Carl Paladino 20 points behind Cuomo in the polls, the press is spending too little attention on the policy points of the candidate that is likely to be the next governor. She then highlights just how little information the press is being provided from Team Cuomo. She writes:
Janison (of Newsday) writes that while making a campaign appearance about the property tax yesterday, Cuomo was “unwilling to say if contracts with public employees should continue past their expiration date if new pacts remain unsettled — as they do now under state law.”
City Hall News’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported today that Cuomo doesn’t always fill out questionnaires from activist groups that they ask for, preferring sometimes to write his own policy statement. It avoids the “yes” or “no” types of answers that can sometimes come back to haunt candidates.
To be fair, some of the media infatuation with Carl Paladino is Paladino’s fault. Still, there is much that has been overhyped. Like the Daily News’ obsession with Paladino’s driver and the f-bomb that may not have been uttered. Yet the media’s grumbling echoes a familiar chord with Paladino’s own charges that the NY press corps has a separate bar for covering Cuomo.
You know the NY media has gone way too far to be propagandists for the left when even the NY Post shills for Cuomo.
I don’t think it would have made much difference anyway, as NY is a 1-party socialist state and the GOP long dead and never to return, but this will so embolden the Democrats to believe that they are (rightly) so completely unbeatable that the corruption, regulation and taxation will reach truly insufferable levels, driving even more business (and Republicans) from the state. They will bankrupt the state, then the Dems and their media lackeys will simply blame the Republicans in Washington (if they take the House) for not bailing them out.
Andrew Cuomo is a joke. He is the essence of Democratic machine politics in New York, just like his father was. If you think he would ever, ever, pass a law or a state budget that would harm any of the people who got him elected, most notably the unions, dream on. As if Cuomo is going to have the stones like Chris Christie does in New Jersey to take on the Teacher’s Union. Sure, dream on. What is so sad is that, if Cuomo gets elected, he’s going to have to deal with the state’s pension crisis for union workers and he simply is not up to the job. If Cuomo is elected, the state will be finished and it WILL go bankrupt.
What’s even funnier about Cuomo are his TV ads. He touts himself as a “reformer” who knows how to deal with the state legislature in Albany. Sure you do, Andrew. There was another candidate who ran for public office not too long ago who said that he would “change” things in Washington by working with people, cross party lines when needed, and be a centrist as well as a fiscal conservative. His name? Oh, that’s an easy one. It was Barack Obama. Yep, those promises really worked out well, didn’t they?
Michael Savage of radio fame has some good advice for Paladino. He says that Paladino should say “I’m not homo-phobic, I’m Cuomo-phobic.”
Yes, the press is going to carry Cuomo’s water, so Paladino has to get the truth out himself. Pictures of Cuomo with Barack Obama and or Barney Frank and or Eliot Spitzer, all criminals in some voters’ minds, would be helpful to that end.
NY liberals/media types are just aching to follow California’s example all the way. There’s still a lot of destruction and misery to be done & Andy is just the man to do it.
Cuomo is a dictionary definition of the word hack. An oligarch on his side of the family as well as his wife’s. The kind of politician Joe Biden’s son would have made had events not thankfully intervened.
The forced end of Patterson’s career by the Democratic Party should be cause for outrage in the black community. But the black community is lost in space. Patterson would have made a far better governor blind than Cuomo will make sighted.
As for Paladino, he threw away a unique opportunity for an unknown politician. Not ready for prime time is the only way to describe him.
“Geez all this water is heavy. You think we should be carrying so much?”
should be
“Geez all this water is heavy. You think we should check if it’s drinkable?”
there. Fixed it.
It seems inevitable that a truckload of manure will soon fall from the sky onto New York state. If it buries Governor Cuomo, isn’t that cosmic justice?
I thought that is the way it is supposed to be, a low bat for the good guys, and the one against the ceiling for everyone else.
the NY Post is not so much shilling for Andrew as trashing Paladino in order to make a distinction between Paladino and all the other GOP challengers.
The New York media is mostly guilty of malpractice. not carrying water – they are not covering any of the elections seriously. Newsday is the only major downstate paper covering all of the contests in some detail, but they are subscription only, and get no echo.
As a close observer, do not underestimate the complete disgust with what NY has become. The big question is whether enough people vote in protest instead of staying at home in protest. Theoretically, if Hawkins (Green) and Barron (Freedom) draw enough protest votes from Democrats, Paladino still has a shot. Hawkins or Barron still have a shot!
Not that anyone can actually fix what is wrong (Pataki lost his way in year 3), but at least we would not have to suffer another Cuomo.
Look on the bright side. The greatest gift to the GOP would be Andrew on his knees begging a Republican congress for money (my estimate is by March 2011) for a Medicaid monster model that is buried in Obamacare.
K2K – it’s a little of both shilling and malpractice. I’ll admit that many in the media may not like Cuomo, but they also fear of pissing him off. Whereas, it is neither case for Paladino.
I think Barron may actually draw a portion of NYC from Cuomo, but no one Upstate knows who in the world he is, I doubt the ‘burbs do either. At this point, I think it’ll be a repeat of 2006 Faso/Spitzer.
Cuomo even delivered a speech admitting to the large risk of default in unconventional mortgages, while downplaying their danger.
I know little about Andrew Cuomo, but the words I’ve heard him utter relative to forging ahead with known bad loans and his part in encouraging same would be enough to make me vote for Paladino if I lived in New York.
Political dynasties sometimes produce morons.
The Democrats have patented and perfected the term SSDD. Cuomo has been around for how long? Has anything changed thanks to him? So why would we expect anything but SSDD if he’s elected?