New York Times - Candidates for Governor Engage in Debate, Sans Spitzer

New York Times - Candidates for Governor Engage in Debate, Sans Spitzer

The two candidates for governor not named Eliot Spitzer debated each other last night in the Buffalo area. But Attorney General Spitzer was the 900-pound gorilla not in the room last night, and his two rivals, the Nassau County executive, Thomas R. Suozzi, a Democrat, and former Assemblyman John Faso, a Republican, spent their hourlong debate taking shots at their higher profile rival and hardly laying a glove on each other.

"Mr. Spitzer didn't deign to show up, and apparently that's how he views the people of western New York," Mr. Faso said.

Mr. Suozzi said that he expected people would say "that John and I are going to gang up on Eliot Spitzer, and you know what, we are. The reality is he refused to show up here for this debate."

Mr. Spitzer was so comfortably ahead that he not only declined invitations to three debates this week, but he also took the unusual step of turning down an invitation for a half-hour of free airtime today from Clear Channel, during which he would have appeared by himself before a panel of local reporters.

The company made the offer after Mr. Spitzer declined an invitation for a debate with Mr. Suozzi ahead of the Sept. 12 Democratic primary, an event that would have been sponsored by WHAM-TV, a Clear Channel station in Rochester.

"We offered both candidates 30 minutes of free airtime on all Clear Channel stations across New York — whichever ones wanted to broadcast it," said Allison Watts, executive producer at WHAM. "He declined that invitation as well." Instead, only Mr. Suozzi will get that free half-hour on stations in Rochester, Binghamton, Syracuse and Elmira. Mr. Suozzi will also get a full hour of free airtime, also before a panel of reporters, on Cablevision stations reaching Long Island, Westchester and parts of New York City on Thursday night. Mr. Spitzer declined the cable company's invitation for a debate.

"We had agreed to two primary debates and believe that is a meaningful number," said Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for the Spitzer campaign.

She was referring to two events sponsored by NY1, a debate between Mr. Suozzi and Mr. Spitzer that took place at Pace University on July 26, and an event scheduled for tomorrow night being billed as a town hall meeting. All three candidates, including Mr. Faso, will be given consecutive time slots to field questions from participants around the state.

They will not appear on a stage at the same time and Mr. Suozzi and Mr. Spitzer will not even be in the same city. The debate over whether this counts as a debate has itself been a running point of contention among the candidates, with Mr. Spitzer's people referring to it as such and Mr. Suozzi's saying it does not count.

Edward Pachetti, a spokesman for NY1, said "It's not a debate; it's a town hall meeting." Last night's debate was held by WKBW in Buffalo and also televised in Syracuse and Binghamton, as well as Web cast. The topics ranged from education funding to upstate job loss to pork-barrel spending.

Mr. Suozzi, a centrist Democrat, and Mr. Faso often seemed to have more in common than not, prompting the debate's moderator to ask the men, as his final question, to explain what differences they had with each other, as opposed to Mr. Spitzer. They did not bite. Mr. Faso said if he were a Democrat he would take "a serious look at Tom Suozzi," while Mr. Suozzi took a breath to say he differed with Mr. Faso on tax cut and education proposals, then resumed attacking Mr. Spitzer.

Mr. Suozzi was notably looser than in his debate last month with Mr. Spitzer, and even broke into song at one point — though even that involved a shot at Mr. Spitzer, as he began to sing the soundtrack from one of his rival's commercials and criticized him for not giving enough specifics in his proposals.

"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine," Mr. Suozzi hummed. "It's beautiful, I love it, it's a wonderful commercial, but it's not a policy."

Mr. Faso chastened Mr. Spitzer on a number of issues and continued to attack his record on pursuing Medicaid fraud — a record the attorney general has vigorously defended. "Mr. Spitzer, while he's been chasing business around the state and chasing Wall Street, has not been particularly effective in going after Medicaid cheats," Mr. Faso said.

Mr. Suozzi and Mr. Faso have considerable ground to make up. The most recent Marist College poll had Mr. Spitzer ahead of Mr. Suozzi among likely Democratic voters 70 to 17 percent. In a head-to-head contest, Mr. Spitzer led Mr. Faso 67 percent to 23 percent among registered voters. And in a recent Quinnipiac University poll, a wide majority of voters said they had not heard enough about either Mr. Suozzi or Mr. Faso to form an opinion.

"Faso is almost anonymous at this point, unknown to 78 percent of the voters," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in a statement released with the findings.

Perhaps in such a race, a candidate can afford to forgo free airtime, or could only be hurt by it.

Darren Dopp, a spokesman for the attorney general's office, said the invitation for airtime today "conflicted with something in the AG's office that we regarded as a priority." That leaves Mr. Suozzi to shadow-box. In a lighthearted on-camera interview with Gawker, the gossip blog, he noted that his standing was on the rise in Marist polls. "You know, I went from 10 points to 17 points, so I've actually gone up 70 percent," he said. "If I go up 70 percent every week for the next three weeks, I've got this thing in the bag."

http://tomsuozzi.com/news/nyt_082906/