Cuomo, Paladino in same parade but diverge on views

Shared ethnic roots can mean little in a campaign like this one.

As if to prove it, the major parties' Italian-American candidates for governor displayed a world of differences in style and tone as they stepped in separate contingents up Fifth Avenue for the Columbus Day parade on Monday.

Candidate Carl Paladino, GOP underdog from the Buffalo real-estate world, mugged as he waved his pair of Italian and American flags, his gait just a bit uneven.

Candidate Andrew Cuomo, the seasoned attorney general from downstate favored in polls, strode like a man with urban parades under his belt.

Cuomo's suited aides worked with the media personnel to manage the short, stationary question-and-answer session. For openers, the Democratic candidate called his opponent's now-famous weekend remarks on gays "a cynical, political ploy."

"We've seen it before," he said. He warned against divisiveness. This was what you expected.

With Paladino, you might expect anything. His troupe for the day included a woman, energetic but clearly unaccustomed to these scrums, who brandished a big sign and yelled at the surrounding reporters to instead "go chase that baby-killer Andrew." Paladino's press encounter became a movable scrum, with Paladino repeatedly belting out his favorite line of the day, how the Gay Pride parade features men in Speedos who "bump and grind against each other."

Despite his ferocious image, Paladino at times had the vulnerable, sympathetic look of an overstimulated tourist. His home turf of Buffalo is, after all, way closer to Cleveland than to Manhattan. Fellow Western New Yorker Michael Caputo, campaign manager, took it on himself to fend off some of the hostile questions lobbed at Paladino, at one point grasping his client by the shoulder and barking, "Slow down, Carl!" This sight of Paladino being handled doesn't come across in the attack ads.

With Cuomo up ahead of him by many blocks, due to the way they were positioned, Paladino seemed encouraged by some of the scattered cheers he received along the route. But he was also greeted on some corners by thickets of Cuomo-Duffy signs and "boos" from those holding them.

"Go back to Buffalo," blurted a guy along the route as Paladino grinned and shook hands.

The heckler might have been inadvertently challenging some of Paladino's fellow Republicans. In response to Paladino's statements regarding gays, Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, the GOP-Conservative candidate to replace Cuomo, said: "Any statements of this nature are offensive. We should be fostering a dialogue on tolerance. These statements do not achieve that, and I do not agree with them."

This, on a day when the city's big crime story had to do with an anti-gay attack by gang members.

Polls all along have showed, logically, that Paladino's biggest support comes from his home turf.

In this race, geography looms large; the candidates' ethnicity, much less so.