New York politics has a by-the-numbers week
By MARC HUMBERT
AP Political Writer
Newsday
July 15, 2006, 11:38 AM EDT
ALBANY, N.Y. -- In New York politics, it has been a week of numbers _ petition signatures, money raised and low job approval ratings scoffed at.
The counting game started Monday when aides to Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi showed up at the state Board of Elections with petitions containing the signatures of about 40,000 of Suozzi's fellow Democrats, he said.
Suozzi only needed valid signatures of 15,000 Democrats in his bid to force the front-running state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer into a Sept. 12 primary for governor. The extra signatures act as a cushion in case rivals challenge the petitions, as has happened more than once in New York's hardball political community.
Polls show Suozzi's attempt to wrest the nomination away from Spitzer is a very, very long shot.
On Tuesday, word came of a profile of Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, in the latest issue of Esquire magazine. It included the front-running potential GOP presidential contender having a discussion with Rep. John Sweeney, an upstate New York Republican, about another potential 2008 GOP presidential candidate, New York's own lame-duck governor, George Pataki.
Sweeney was telling McCain, according to the piece, that many GOP-held congressional seats were in play in New York this election season.
"A big part of the problem, Sweeney says, is Governor George Pataki: `He's checked out, and everybody knows it. Plus, there's still that big hole in Manhattan. You know what his approval rating is? Twenty-nine,"' the congressman said, according to the article.
McCain's responded: "I don't know anyone with a twenty-nine who thinks he can make a run for president."
That "big hole" is, of course, the gaping scar that remains at ground zero in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center towers. The rebuilding effort has faced repeated delays. Pataki has not been able to avoid blame.
On Wednesday, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani added the number "5" to the equation. That is how many states he visited over a three-day span ending Wednesday as he sought to help Republican candidates running for office this fall in Ohio, Arkansas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Maryland. The trip may, of course, have had another purpose. At the last stop, in Maryland, Giuliani said he was "seriously considering" running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008.
Also Wednesday, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute came out with new numbers _ a survey of New York City voters. A whopping 72 percent approved of the job being done by the current mayor, billionaire Democrat-turned-Republican Michael Bloomberg. But just 40 percent said they would probably vote for him if he ran for president.
On Thursday, it was back to petition signatures being filed with the state.
Anti-Iraq war activist Jonathan Tasini had a stack he said contained signatures of about 40,000 Democrats who were willing to support his effort to force Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton into a September primary.
And there were three other Democrats who filed petitions because they wanted to force former federal Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo into a primary for state attorney general.
Of the anti-Cuomo trio, Charlie King led the way with what he said were 51,500 signatures. Interestingly, King and the elder son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo used to be pals. King was the younger Cuomo's choice for lieutenant governor in 2002 when he made a disastrously unsuccessful run of his own for the Democratic nomination for governor. Before that, King was regional director in New York City for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development when Cuomo ran HUD. King and Cuomo are no longer pals.
Joining King on the petition filing line were former Clinton White House aide Sean Patrick Maloney (about 47,000 signatures) and former New York City Public Advocate Mark Green (about 40,000 signatures). Green narrowly lost the 2001 New York City mayor's race.
As the week wound down, aides to the statewide candidates were putting the finishing touches on financial reports that were to show Clinton and Spitzer with huge leads over all their potential rivals in the battle for that mother's milk of politics _ money.
