Cuomo hammers home key points upstate

He’s said everything he wants to say dozens of times by now, but Andrew Cuomo took to the air Saturday to hammer home a few key points at two far-flung get-out-the-vote rallies upstate.

And for good measure, the Cuomo campaign issued his eighth policy book, this one on the environment, and collected an endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters.

“Are we fired up? Are we ready to go? Are we going to make New York the Empire State again?” Cuomo hollered to several hundred volunteers at a Rochester warehouse. Dozens of boxes of supermarket coffee and doughnuts were lined up for them by the Monroe County Democratic Committee at the back of the hall, near the walking maps, sign-up sheets and crates of flyers.

Cuomo’s message, repeated and refined on the stump since his nomination in May, boils down to this: New York isn’t living within its means; it has no economic future as the highest-taxed state in the nation; he’s the man to clean up Albany because he has pursued corrupt politicians without regard to party, and his Republican rival, Carl Paladino is an divisive extremist, out of touch with New York’s liberal social tradition.

“On Tuesday, voters are going to say, ‘Don’t you ever try to divide New Yorkers,’ ” Cuomo said at a cider mill in Ballston Lake, north of Albany, where he wrapped up his 62-county tour. “We celebrate our diversity. It makes us stronger.”

Among other things, Cuomo’s fiscal platform will require wresting the state’s political center of gravity away from the public-sector labor unions, pushing through program cuts and more modest benefits for new government workers. But thanks in part to Paladino’s many missteps, Cuomo has made it all the way through the campaign without having to spell out the details on how he will close an $8 billion deficit next year without raising taxes.

For all the policy proposals in his books, Cuomo has not said which of the state’s 1,000 agencies he thinks should be eliminated — that work would be done by a commission charged with reinventing the layers of programs that have gathered by “accretion” over the decades, he said in a recent interview. And while he has said that there will have to be cuts in the state’s costly Medicaid program, just where those cuts fall would be shaped in collaboration with major health providers.

Cuomo’s environmental agenda aims to “green” communities through a grants for housing, transportation, pollution control and energy efficiency; foster investment in solar energy and alternative vehicles; protect open space, and solve environmental problems in low-income neighborhoods.

The conservation league Saturday pronounced his agenda “forward-thinking.” But Cuomo said there would be no additional money for the beleaguered Department of Environmental Conservation, whose commissioner was fired for balking at more staff layoffs. “We are going to have to do more with less,” he said.

With James T. Madore