Cuomo works on visiting all 62 New York counties

Herkimer: Check! Oneida: Check! Tioga: Check!

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo spent a marathon day zigzagging through upstate New York on Friday, working to keep one campaign promise on which voters can actually measure his performance before Election Day: visiting all 62 counties in New York State.

He started the day with a rally of a few dozen Democrats in the Erie Canal community of Little Falls (Herkimer County), where under his stewardship the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development helped finance canalside marinas, renovations of old mills and installations of bike trails.

Then it was on through hill and dale, past storybook farms and splendid autumn scenery, to a United Food and Commercial Workers union hall in Oriskany, (Oneida County), a historic inn in Cazenovia (Madison County), the catering room of Thirsty's Tavern in Binghamton (Broome County), then on to Elmira (Chemung County) ending the evening in scenic (if dark) Owego (Tioga County).

By the end of this weekend, he will have just four counties left to visit - including the one where he grew up: Queens.

"I said at the beginning of this campaign I was going to do it," Cuomo explained in Oriskany. "I work for the people of this state . . . It is my job as an elected official to go to them."

Plus, he said, "I just enjoy it."

The 62-county campaign tour was made nationally famous in 2000 when then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton used it to prove she could become a real New Yorker, trailed by vanloads of press through one-horse town cafes and chamber of commerce breakfasts from Plattsburgh to Salamanca.

But the tradition was actually started by New York's senior U.S. senator, Charles Schumer, who actually visits all 62 counties every year - and hits the major population centers at least once a month.

Cuomo, who played a leading operations role in his father Mario's gubernatorial campaigns, said Friday he can't remember how those campaigns covered the state. But other political greybeards say that before Schumer, campaigns tended to concentrate on the state's population centers and pockets of likely voters, viewing rural areas as a waste of precious campaign time and money.

Cuomo's opponent Carl Paladino, who criscrossed the same section of central New York yesterday, isn't aiming to hit all 62 counties, though he will visit somewhere in the "mid-50s," his campaign manager, Michael Caputo said Friday. They've tried to set up events that draw people from at least a three-county area, he said.

"When you are up against a $20-million man, it's very difficult to set the same targets," Caputo said. "Cuomo has the money from the special interests to go where he wants and do what he wants. We have to make dificult choices."

Paladino has been pressing Cuomo to make time for another face-to-face debate but Cuomo said that in addition to visiting the last few counties on his list, "we have issue papers that we want to get out - policy papers."