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No one seems more impervious to traditional media assault than the aggressive and unapologetic Republican candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino

The Welcome “Extremism” of New York’s Carl Paladino



The liberal ruling class meme holds that the Tea Party is unleashing nutty extremist candidates onto the American political scene, and every successful Tea Party insurgent from Rand Paul to Sharon Angle to Joe Miller to Christine O'Donnell has had their fundamental sanity questioned at some point during their campaigns.

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What the ruling class elite really mean by extremism though is that a brash, new brand of constitutional and fiscal fundamentalist is becoming inoculated against media attack and is now largely immune from standard liberal criticism. And no one seems more impervious to traditional media assault than the aggressive and unapologetic Republican candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino. Having roundly defeated the milquetoast moderate Rick Lazio in the party's primary, Paladino is taking straight aim at Andrew Cuomo, next in the royal line of democrat succession to become king of New York State.

Paladino has taken to energetic political offense

Paladino’s war strategy against New York liberalism could become the bible for achieving conservative electoral ascendancy in even the bluest of states. Rather than passively and unilaterally accepting RINO Marquis of Queensbury rules against no-holds-barred democrats, Paladino has taken to energetic political offense. He behaves like a belligerent, and does his best to offend some cushy member of the ruling class nearly every day. And he’s become a successful populist revolutionary hero because of it, while confusing every RINO and liberal in the tri-state region. Carl Paladino, a successful real estate developer from Buffalo, has clearly expressed the notion that the entire New York state governing structure has to be blown up if the state is to have any chance to recover from decades of liberal mismanagement. When asked how he would work with the democrat assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, Paladino replied, “Why would I work with Sheldon Silver? He’s wrong.” Surely, this man is the anti-McCain, unwilling to accept the premise that compromise of principle can ever lead us onto a lasting, corrective political path. If elected governor, Paladino guarantees that, “It’s not going to be pretty. It’s going to be very confrontational.” Amen. Paladino’s take-no-prisoner approach to electoral politics has the pundits shaking their heads in disbelief. Paladino is simply knocking the ruling class off balance. It’s not only his boldly stated ideas expressed in a clear, unadorned style that so many New Yorkers find appealing but the fact that he’s a brawler who naturally uses the kind of crude language that most democrats have felt was exclusively their own idiom. For democrats, the use of tough street talk is meant to convey a sense that they serve as the mouthpiece of the average worker, in contrast to the stuffy country club republicans who represent the aristocratic gentry. In that context, it becomes completely acceptable for our current gangster-in-chief in the White House to say, “ If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” or to explain during the Gulf crisis that he was looking to see “whose # to kick”; for the vice-president to say about the passage of Obamacare, “This is a big, f---ing deal”; and for Obama’s favorite union thug, Andy Stern, the former head of SEIU to threaten, “If we can’t use the power of persuasion, we will use the persuasion of power.” But when Paladino mocks Cuomo’s manhood by saying “Dear Andrew, for the first time in your life, be a man" and "face me and the other candidates in open debate," and implores the phony scion to get out from “behind daddy's coattails even though he pulled strings to advance your career every step of your way," the consultants worry that such things shouldn’t be said by a serious candidate directly, but only by surrogates. And the ruling media class that regularly labels tea partiers with the vilest of homosexual epithets (tea-bagger) becomes suddenly schoolmarmish and red-faced when they hear about Paladino’s off-color and cartoonish emails. If the ruling class liberal democrats had any experience with actual physical work (not to be confused with journalism or law school) their horror might be attenuated. In Paladino’s milieu of construction sites and the building trades, sending emails with bestiality attachments would barely even register on the shock meter. Why does such behavior disgust liberals when the running of a male prostitution ring out of Barney Frank’s basement was considered completely normal? His campaign ferocity aside, Paladino can be expected to hit Cuomo with substantive policy critiques and charges of corruption. This is rich territory indeed, for Cuomo was in charge of Bill Clinton’s HUD when the lending practices were put in place that ultimately resulted in the mortgage market collapse and financial meltdown of 2008. Cuomo is as responsible for our current fiscal mess as is Barney Frank or Chris Dodd.

Paladino needs to reload and refocus his campaign on New York’s fiscal nightmare

Carl Paladino is a very popular man in most of upstate New York, and in his home base of Erie County he earned 93% voter support in his recent primary win. But Paladino needs to reload and refocus his campaign on New York’s fiscal nightmare. If he can peel away a few voters from suburban NYC, those who must be frightened by the state’s violent decline and catastrophic levels of taxation, maybe it’s not too late to pull off a squeaker. If victorious he pledges to serve only one term. But that will be enough to transform blue state politics for a generation.


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Claude Sandroff -- Bio and Archives

Claude writes regularly on politics, energy and science.  He is a former research scientist currently working with high tech companies in Silicon Valley.


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