Posted on 09/15/2002 5:06:55 PM PDT by NYer
Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano wants to be a real player in the best little gubernatorial election big money can buy.
He's already contributed big time to the pot. A vicious primary fight with the Pataki crowd over who would be the nominee on both the Independence and Conservative party lines in November's general election cost Golisano approximately $33 million out of his own pocket. Apparently, getting just one of those minor party lines, the Independence, was enough to consider it money well spent.
Buoyed, cheered, enthused, Golisano could spend $40 million, $50 million, $100 million -- whatever it takes -- in the seven weeks leading up to the election, an adviser says.
If he does spend the $100 million, that would make Golisano's bid, in which he can at the outside expect to draw 11 or 12 percent of the vote, the most expensive non-presidential campaign in American political history.
He would trump Michael Bloomberg, who spent more than $70 million of his own money to become New York City's mayor, and industrialist Jay Corzine's comparable personal expenditure to buy a U.S. senatorship from New Jersey. Except Golisano is doing this without a snowball's chance of winning anything except a ticket back to Rochester.
So what in the world is his point? Moreover, what does he stand for other than being a guy willing to waste unfathomable amounts of money to promote his mug on campaign literature and television ads?
He says he'll discuss job creation and managing the state budget in the coming weeks, but so far he's offered no alternative platform to what the major parties are proposing. His positions on the few issues he has talked about, like campaign finance reform and education, don't seem well thought out, or his quirky views acceptable to mainstream voters.
Then, who are you, Tom Golisano?
Because you've made no real effort to define what you stand for in terms of a complete platform, or how you would go about governing this state differently.
Why don't you open up a line of soup kitchens upstate instead? We need those. And sure, if you have a credible set of plans for breathing life into the moribund upstate economy, please feel free. Throw $100 million at that and we will all applaud and support you gratis for a run at public office, anything you want.
But spending $100 million on professional political operatives and media advertising to sell your face? That's the height of personal and political arrogance.
Those who want to see a desperate problem in all this for Gov. George Pataki are advancing the notion that Golisano's gold-plated tilt at the windmill will hurt Pataki and help McCall.
Reality is elsewhere. Early polls show Golisano's wobbly anti-establishment message takes from both camps, nearly equally. Not a surprise, since Democrats in upstate cities like Buffalo, Albany and Syracuse are as conservative as Republicans anywhere, and Rochester is Golisano country, regardless of party affiliation.
None of this is to suggest that Tom Golisano won't become a factor in the general election. He just won't be a determining factor.
Nor will he become governor. The Pataki Republicans, who bungled the primary against Golisano on Long Island and underestimated his chief strategist, Roger Stone, will get serious. The Democrats will put their message out and hope the race tightens automatically because, after all, this is a Democratic state, by a 5-to-3 enrollment margin.
And you and I will marvel at $100 million worth of Tom Golisano on television and in the newspapers, and still be left wondering why. They call this the silly season for a good reason.
Contact Fred LeBrun at 454-5453.
Tom is a businessman = tax write off! (Fred LeBrun is not the most astute political analyst. That is why he is still reporting up here in Albany for the Times Union).
Oh, and if ou intend to call Fred, the area code up here is 518.
Figures.
Sinkspur, it is the contention of many that Golisano (invited into this campaign by the democratic rival, H. Carl McCall) intends to do to Pataki what Ross Perot did to Bush Sr., in the 1992 presidential campaign, when he stole enough votes away from Bush to allow Clinton to slip in as the president of the US.
Coincidence? I think NOT.
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