Former President Clinton campaigns for Cuomo

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo held a get-out-the-vote rally in Brooklyn yesterday, presenting the best reference he can offer for the job he wants voters to give him next week: His old boss, former President Bill Clinton, under whom Cuomo served as secretary of housing and urban development.

"Andrew Cuomo is my friend," Clinton told the crowd of 1,200 people, praising Cuomo as a "turnaround CEO" who "won all these prizes just by making government work for people."

But the event was less of a fist-pumping rally than a patient lecture by a long-winded but cherished political grandpa who insists on repeating stories from the good old days - in this case, his administration, which closed the federal deficit and created millions of jobs, he reminded them.

"I want to talk to you a little bit today - y'all sit down!" Clinton said in opening his speech to the audience, which included Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, numerous New York City officials and at least two members of Congress.

Cuomo was brought to Washington at age 34 to serve on the Clinton transition team, then was hired as assistant secretary of housing and urban development, taking the top spot in the agency after Secretary Henry Cisneros left amid an adultery scandal.

"All this gray hair? That's where I got it," Cuomo joked of his work during the Clinton years. This week Cuomo said he had learned important political lessons from Clinton, who he said had "tremendous faith in people," and drove his policy agenda forward by selling it to the voters, figuring that lawmakers would follow.

Democrats, Clinton said, are faced with a predicament of running at a time when the economy is no longer "off a cliff" but still "in the ditch."

"There's always a gap between when you do something and when people feel better," Clinton said. "And people hire Democrats to fix things, right? . . . We just have to take our lumps and make our case."

National polls showing a Republican resurgence, Clinton argued, are based on an assumption that the African-American vote will be 40 percent lower than it was when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, something he challenged the audience to disprove.

"I believe that Andrew Cuomo has the potential to resolve this 30-year-old debate: . . . Are we all in this together or not?" The audience responded with cheers. Afterward, as is his habit, the former president stayed to shake every single hand offered to him.