New York Governor Destroyed In Soon-To-Be Viral Ad Featuring His Opponent’s Wife
” Sheila Astorino is a mother, school teacher and the wife of Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino who’s challenging New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Sheila is featured in a new ad that says what Cuomo is doing is “unforgiveable.” “
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” In large stretches of upstate New York, it is the reason Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is deeply unpopular. To many voters in New York City and its suburbs, it is one of his crowning achievements.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, made New York the first state to pass a broad package of new gun laws after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. Seizing a singular political moment, he called it the Safe Act, and he implored Congress to follow his lead.
Nearly two years later, as he seeks a second term, Mr. Cuomo presents the act to his supporters as one of his greatest successes, and Democrats are assailing the governor’s Republican challenger, Rob Astorino, for being lax on guns. It remains one of the most far-reaching pieces of gun-control legislation passed in response to the Newtown shooting.
But in pushing for passage of strict new gun laws, Mr. Cuomo alienated a vocal constituency across upstate New York, a region he has otherwise wooed. In court, gun owners have challenged the constitutionality of the laws; on lawn signs and bumper stickers in places like the Catskills and western New York, they demand their repeal.
Counties, towns and villages have passed resolutions denouncing the laws, and some counties have even demanded that their official seals not be used on any paperwork relating to them. In response to an open records request, the governor’s office shared hundreds of pages of such resolutions, from far-flung places like the Adirondack town of North Hudson, with 238 residents, to more populous areas like Erie County.
“ The calculation when it was passed was people were going to get mad for a little while and then get over it,” Stephen J. Aldstadt, the president of the Shooters Committee on Political Education, said. “I don’t think people are getting over it.” Despite its scope, the Safe Act was not everything it was originally intended to be, and there were stumbles. A provision limiting the size of gun magazines, for example, turned out to be unworkable.
Thirty-two days after the shooting in Newtown, on Jan. 15, 2013, Mr. Cuomo signed the act into law. The measure included an expanded ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as a broader requirement for background checks, and tougher penalties for gun crimes.”
Read the whole article at NY Times
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” Gov. Cuomo, “crazed with anger” and increasingly abusive to those around him, fears the first round of public polling since the “Morelandgate” scandal will take a major toll on his — until-now — sky-high popularity, administration insiders say.
He won’t have long to wait.
A poll designed to gauge the scandal’s impact will be released this week by the Marist Institute of Public Opinion and it could have a major impact on Cuomo’s race against Republican Rob Astorino and on his Democratic primary battle with Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor.
Administration insiders, aware of private polling data already collected by Cuomo’s campaign, say the public poll likely will show the governor’s approval rating plummeting.
“ The bad news is starting to stick. This is very serious,’’ a senior Cuomo administration figure nervously told The Post.”
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” As his run for re-election starts to gear up, Gov. Cuomo is in surprisingly weak shape. With a huge war chest in a heavily Democratic state, he’s still the odds-on favorite — but he’s suddenly looking a lot more vulnerable.
Here are 10 big reasons why the governor has to worry.
He burned Mayor de Blasio. Sure, he made himself look good to centrist voters by humiliating the new herald of progressivism on both pre-K and charter schools. But he also earned a black eye with the left — and made an enemy of the mayor, who after all is the top politician in a city where Cuomo needs a lot of votes come November.
He’s annoyed the public-employee unions. He tightened the state school-aid spigot and put in his property-tax cap, making it harder for teachers locals across New York to win higher pay. Then he pushed for test-based teacher evaluations, anathema to the unions. (Yes, the scheme never had real teeth, but unions can’t stand the precedent.) And he topped it all off with his embrace of charters — which the unions, not without reason, see as a naked bid for fat hedge-fund donations. Other unions feel burned because he forced modest contracts on most state-employee unions and won minor public-pension reforms. They won’t go to war on him for that — but why should they lift a finger to help?Now his sudden rush to win some union friends is getting ugly. Few voters will notice or care that the Transit Workers Union contract pays for raises by adding hundreds of millions to the MTA’s long-term liabilities — but they can understand a $6 million TWU slush fund.
His robotic pretense that he’s still “studying” fracking after three-plus years is an oozing political sore. It tells people leading hardscrabble lives all across Upstate that he cares more about millionaires and special interests than he does about them — and doesn’t even have the guts to be upfront about it. The hypocrisy of his pose is so rank, it’s hard to see how anyone can trust his word on anything, public or private.”
Read the entire , heartwarming analysis at the NY Post
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” After his worst week in office since becoming governor, Andrew Cuomo is now viewed for the first time by important Democrats as potentially vulnerable to Republican challenger Rob Astorino, The Post has learned.
The changing sentiment results from the extraordinary criticisms Cuomo received last week from corruption-fighting Southern District US Attorney Preet Bharara — because of the governor’s summary dismissal of his anti-corruption Moreland Commission panel — and from an assortment of “good-government’’ over his transparently phony plan for a severely limited system of publicly financed elections.
“ It was a disastrous week for Andrew. He was being attacked all over town, and it appeared to be the culmination of not just weeks, but months, of eroding support for the governor from within his own Democratic base,’’ one of the state’s most influential Democrats told The Post.”
The NY Post has more
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Eric Allie’s Furious Diaper
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