Edited by: TJVNews.com
As the New York gubernatorial race heats up and Hochul challenger Rep. Lee Zeldin continues to climb in the polls it appears that a possible red wave in the November elections could take place.
In a Sunday interview on WABC 770 AM’s “Cats Roundtable” hosted by former New York City mayoral candidate and billionaire John Catsimatidis, former New York state Governor David Paterson said that the incumbent Hochul can avoid an upset in a race in which she had clearly held a strong lead, by jettisoning her “Rose Garden strategies” and advised her to “get out there and make her case to the public,” as was reported by the New York Post.
Paterson shares some history with Hochul as he too became governor of the Empire State after his predecessor Eliot Spitzer had resigned his post due to negative press regarding a very public sex scandal. Paterson served out nearly three years of Spitzer’s term from March 2008 to the end of 2010. He is the first legally blind person to be sworn in as governor of a U.S. state and is the first African American governor of New York, as was reported by Wikipedia.
Paterson said that Hochul was making a political blunder by attacking Zeldin and his record as he focuses on the public’s concern over the spiraling crime rate that has gripped the city and the state, the Post reported.
“A number of people are just, uh, anxious, and after everything we went through in the pandemic, now we get to go out,” Paterson, 68, told John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM’s “Cats Roundtable.”
“Now they’re afraid to go out because of crime. And I think that speaks to the broader range of people around the city no matter what their political affiliation is,” he said, as was reported by the Post. “Even if at times, if the public is getting more excited or more fearful than they should be, you still have to answer that feeling as a leader.”
The former New York governor also said that Hochul’s mistake was trying to deflect the crime issue by focusing her criticism of Zeldin on his stance as a pro-life advocate and his association with and support of former president Donald Trump. Paterson said that this strategy does not prove successful because “there is no such thing as bad publicity,” as was reported by the Post.
Paterson did say that what was productive on the part of Hochul was pushing her litany of legislative accomplishments in recent days.
New York’s 55th governor issued a warning to Hochul that the deep concern that the New York electorate has over the escalating crime rates should not be under estimated and that voters will make their anxiety known at the polling booth, the Post reported. During the interview, Paterson recalled that he was of the belief that one of the major factors that contributed to the defeat at the polls of the late New York City mayor David Dinkins was the 1990 subway slaying of US Open fan Brian Watkins.
“It was such a major issue in the city — the pain that family endured, and they were tourists coming to New York, that I think it actually contributed to the loss of Mayor David Dinkins when he ran against uh, the inevitable mayor, uh, Rudy Giuliani in 1993,” Paterson told the listeners of the Catsimatidis radio program, as was reported by the Post.
The Post also reported that Paterson, who resides in Harlem said that he now takes certain precautions that he didn’t employ when crime was much higher in the 90s. He said that this was due to the fact that violent crime appears to be more randomized. The city reported 485 murders last year compared to 2,245 in 1990, reported that Post.
“There’s things that I do now to be more careful that I didn’t do 30 years ago, because that crime wave — even though we were having more than two thousand deaths from murder every year — was generated mostly by the infiltration of crack … in places that were compartmentalized. You knew where it was,” Paterson said during the interview, according to the Post report.
Paterson predicted, however, that the gubernatorial race would not be a landslide in Hochul’s favor but he did predict that she would emerge victorious with a 6 to 10 point lead over Zeldin. The Post also reported that he said that Zeldin was offering no substantive plans to battle crime but rather was offering “reactions.”
As to Zeldin’s position on the controversial bail reform law in New York State, Paterson said that his proposal to squelch the law through an executive order would be considered illegal under the state’s constitution, the Post reported.
