{"id":2510,"date":"2010-08-19T11:33:04","date_gmt":"2010-08-19T15:33:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=2510"},"modified":"2010-09-01T13:45:17","modified_gmt":"2010-09-01T17:45:17","slug":"are-the-wheels-coming-off-rick-lazios-gubernatorial-bid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/08\/19\/are-the-wheels-coming-off-rick-lazios-gubernatorial-bid\/","title":{"rendered":"Are the wheels coming off Rick Lazio’s gubernatorial bid?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politicians have bad weeks and terrible weeks and for Rick Lazio this one is both at the same time. Here’s the context:<\/p>\n

The man who gave up a solid congressional career to get pummeled by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2000 Senate race (insuring his footnote place in history) is running again against another political dynasty.<\/p>\n

This time Lazio is aiming for the governor’s seat, trying to topple Democratic heir apparent Andrew Cuomo<\/p>\n

Cuomo is a guy who desperately needs a stiff challenge, if voters are to get any kind of clear idea about his ambitions or policy ideas.<\/p>\n

But it looks increasingly like Lazio’s not the man for the job.<\/p>\n

A new Siena poll<\/a> shows Cuomo still running away from the Republicans, leading by a ridiculously large 30 points.<\/p>\n

What’s more, Lazio faces an increasingly serious — I’m avoiding the word credible in this context — challenge from Carl Palladino, a tea party favorite who is fond of lobbing rhetorical grenades.<\/p>\n

As a consequence, Lazio has himself jumped on the bombast bandwagon swirling around the so-called “Ground Zero” mosque.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

This ad issued by the Lazio campaign isn’t misleading: it is unabashed, heartstring-yanking baloney propaganda.<\/p>\n

(The Islamic group developing the mosque has no ties to 9\/11. There are no suspicions of any link to terror funding. Quoting a bunch of poorly informed people on the streets of Manhattan doesn’t change that.)<\/p>\n

Lazio’s flirtation with demagoguery aside, he also faces an investigative article<\/a> by the Village Voice that probes his wheeling-and-dealing while working at JPMorgan during the years when his political career was on hold.<\/p>\n

The article doesn’t reveal any criminal wrongdoing, but it paints a portrait of a Wall Street insider working to game the kind of big-government Washington dollars that he’s been deriding in his bid for the top job in Albany.<\/p>\n

This campaign has just over two full months to go.<\/p>\n

Unless Lazio can grab some kind of traction — the mosque kerfuffle doesn’t seem to be doing the trick — he’s likely to get a second footnote in the history books, as the man trounced by the Clintons AND the Cuomos.<\/p>\n

The question may be whether he reaches the finish line with any of his dignity intact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politicians have bad weeks and terrible weeks and for Rick Lazio this one is both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2511,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions\/2511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}