The New York Times today endorsed Mark Green, delivering a major shot across the bow for Andrew Cuomo and reinvigorating Green's candidacy.
If there are excellent Democratic candidates for governor this year, the race to succeed Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a lot more contentious and a lot less promising. But there’s little question that the former public advocate, Mark Green, is the candidate whose experience and record best fit this job.
From the beginning, this race has been a contest between Mr. Green and Andrew Cuomo, the former secretary of housing and urban development. Two other candidates, Sean Patrick Maloney and Charlie King, are interesting politicians who have little chance to win this particular contest.
I still say that Maloney is the best and most interesting choice of the four (with Charlie King also great, but with a somewhat misplaced message, as I told him at his pre-campaign cocktail reception), but he's been pigeonholed, partially by design and partially by default, as the gay candidate; which is not per se a liability in this state, but did keep the rest of his message from getting out. He'll likely wind up with a juicy job in a Spitzer administration and be on the watchlist going forward. But back to the Times:
Mr. Green has run for a lot of offices and has frequently been undone by his prickly personality. But when elected, he has always repaid voters by doing the job well. For attorney general in the Democratic primary, we recommend Mark Green.
In short, he may be an S.O.B., but he's damn good at what he does. They're right; you only have to compare Green's tenure to that of Betsy Gotbaum - yes, I know, Betsy who? - to get a measure of what he could do as Attorney General. Arguably, Cuomo would do a better job than Gotbaum (faint praise indeed), but Green would keep the office sexy and relevant. So what if he pisses people off? isn't that what we want from the next AG?
