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With declaration, exec now fair game

BY ERROL A. COCKFIELD JR | NEWSDAY ALBANY BUREAU CHIEF

February 26, 2006

New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is seen after a fundraiser at the Glen Oaks Country Club in Old Westbury. (Newsday / Karen Wiles Stabile / February 15, 2006)

Until Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi ended a long dance yesterday and made his gubernatorial run official, state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had stood alone for more than a year as the only announced Democrat in the field.

But Suozzi's campaign launch in Glen Cove, the city of his birth, immediately shifted the competition between both men into a more vocal war of words.

Suozzi said he is better prepared for the job of governor because he is managing a government that represents 1.3 million people and had turned around Nassau's finances.

"My opponent is a prosecutor and I'm a chief executive," he said. Later, he added, "I have the experience as a government reformer that my opponent does not have."

Responding, Spitzer's campaign and his supporters scoffed at the idea that the executive of a county could compare his background to Spitzer's now-famous challenge of Wall Street power brokers. And in one sign of higher stakes, the attorney general's aides made Spitzer's surrogates available to the media yesterday.

One of those backers, Suffolk Democratic Chairman Richard Schaffer, said that while Suozzi has sought to portray himself as a political outsider, he comes from a politically influential family. His father, uncle and now his cousin have all served as mayors of Glen Cove. "Suozzi calling himself an outsider is like someone saying Dick Cheney is a good hunting partner," he said.

When asked later about Schaffer's comments, Suozzi noted that he had not supported his cousin Ralph when he won the mayoral bid last fall.

Many pundits have already ruled out Suozzi's viability, but Michael Dawidziak, a Suffolk-based Republican political consultant, said, "Regardless of what the dynamics are, voters always want a choice."

With Spitzer enjoying an overwhelming lead in the polls, the attorney general refrained from engaging Suozzi head-on.

Instead, he has issued veiled assaults, including an eight-paragraph statement of his accomplishments that Ryan Toohey, the attorney general's campaign manager, released yesterday. It included a mention of his fight against corporate fraud, which Toohey noted had returned billions of dollars to New Yorkers.