ALBANY, N.Y. — Democratic candidate for governor Andrew Cuomo’s slick new campaign ad calling for ethics reform in Albany was immediately countered Thursday by Republican candidate Rick Lazio with a low-tech ambush video showing Cuomo using a back door at a fundraiser for Rep. Charles Rangel, who’s facing House ethics charges. “Runaway” is a slightly out-of-focus video distributed over the...
ALBANY, N.Y. — Democratic candidate for governor Andrew Cuomo’s slick new campaign ad calling for ethics reform in Albany was immediately countered Thursday by Republican candidate Rick Lazio with a low-tech ambush video showing Cuomo using a back door at a fundraiser for Rep. Charles Rangel, who’s facing House ethics charges.
“Runaway” is a slightly out-of-focus video distributed over the Internet by Lazio, whose campaign has collected a small fraction of the campaign donations of Cuomo’s campaign.
Lazio’s staff apparently staked out a back door where Cuomo, the state attorney general, arrived with a staff member and then departed from the campaign fundraiser for Rangel on Wednesday night in Manhattan. Cuomo was asked, apparently by a Lazio staffer, about his support for Rangel, but he declined to comment before getting into a black SUV.
“The day before Andrew Cuomo released his two-faced ad he toasted the disgraced Charlie Rangel at a special-interest-funded dinner,” Lazio said Thursday. “If New Yorkers are to believe Andrew Cuomo is going to fix Albany, then he should begin by refunding the over $9 million in special interest money in his campaign war chest as his own ad suggests and investigate suspected lawbreakers, not toast them.”
Hundreds of supporters, including several Democratic leaders, attended the Rangel event at The Plaza hotel. A House ethics panel has accused Rangel, the former Ways and Means Committee chairman, of using official stationery to raise money for a college center bearing his name; delaying tax payments on income on a rental unit in the Dominican Republic; failing to file his financial disclosure statements on time; and operating four rent-stabilized apartments in New York, including one he used as a campaign office.
Rangel has denied the accusations announced by the ethics panel and has said they contain factual errors.
Lazio’s video came on a day Cuomo released his ad statewide. Cuomo’s ad calls ethical behavior in Albany disgraceful and the government dysfunctional. The ad seeks support for his proposed 20-point plan to improve ethics in state government. He wants a ban on pay-to-play practices involving lobbyists, who are among the biggest campaign contributors.
Cuomo said Thursday that the ad, which doesn’t mention he’s running for governor, is aimed at mobilizing a disgusted public around a plan to improve Albany. He wouldn’t say if he would have vetoed the Legislature’s own ethics reform package, which was vetoed by Democratic Gov. David Paterson as too weak. Cuomo said he didn’t want to “prejudge” a bill that could potentially return to the floors of the Democrat-led Assembly and Senate.
But Cuomo sided with at least some of Paterson’s objections to the bill, saying “self-policing is an oxymoron” and “selective disclosure” of outside business interests doesn’t work.
Republican Carl Paladino, facing Lazio in the Sept. 14 Republican primary, said he would take action against offenders and Albany’s ethics reform bills “are laughably inadequate.”
“When Carl is elected governor,” his spokesman Michael Caputo said, “every public official will be scrutinized and held accountable for the conflicts of interest rampant in Albany for decades. And anyone found guilty of corruption will forfeit their fat pension, too.”