Beware of GOP Gov Candidate Carl Paladino's 'Bluster and Belligerence,' New Yorkers
The Tea Party movement is on the boil; Wednesday's lead story marked real estate developer and blunt-speaking political outsider Carl Paladino's upset win in the New York Republican gubernatorial primary election.
But reporters David Halbfinger and Michael Barbaro framed the conservative victory in a negative light, front-loading with repetitions of every criticism the paper has made against Paladino of late, in "G.O.P. Newcomer, in Jolt, Wins Governors' Primary."
Carl P. Paladino, a Buffalo multimillionaire who jolted the Republican Party with his bluster and belligerence, rode a wave of disgust with Albany to the nomination for governor of New York on Tuesday, toppling Rick A. Lazio, a former congressman who earned establishment support but inspired little popular enthusiasm.
Mr. Paladino became one of the first Tea Party candidates to win a Republican primary for governor, in a state where the Republican Party has historically succeeded by choosing moderates.
The result was a potentially destabilizing blow for New York Republicans. It put at the top of the party's ticket a volatile newcomer who has forwarded e-mails to friends containing racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally's comparison of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to "an Antichrist or a Hitler."
Yet Mr. Paladino, 64, energized Tea Party advocates and social conservatives with white-hot rhetoric and a damn-the-establishment attitude, promising to "take a baseball bat to Albany" to dislodge the state's entrenched political class. He also outspent Mr. Lazio, pouring more than $3 million of his fortune into the race, while Mr. Lazio spent just over $2 million.
