Cuomo's move in Paterson probe linked to poll numbers?

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo left foggy Thursday the details of exactly why he is calling in ex-chief Judge Judith Kaye as independent counsel in the probes of lame-duck Gov. David A. Paterson.

Instead, Cuomo spoke of "credible issues to resolve" in both investigations: "If there was no merit to either of these referrals, I could have saved everyone a lot of time and dismissed them."

By stating he is "removing" himself from the case, Cuomo, in his current dual identity as elected law-enforcement official and probable candidate for governor, now becomes subject to either a trusting political narrative or a cynical one.

Some had questioned at the outset if it wasn't a conflict for him to accept the job of probing Paterson's apparent role in the domestic-abuse case against his close aide and Paterson's apparently petty deceptions in the acceptance of free baseball tickets.

If you'd taken the AG at his word, he wasn't about to abandon his day job, and so rejecting the cases would have been doing just that.

As you'd expect, Rick Lazio, Republican candidate for governor, promoted the cynical view of Cuomo's involvement-and-then-distancing. "It should not have required two weeks and a drop in the polls for Andrew Cuomo to recognize what he should have instinctively known from the beginning," Lazio said.

According to the most recent Marist poll, issued Tuesday, Cuomo's approval rating dropped from 67 to 54 percent. There were significant declines among nonwhite voters - 22 percent - and New York City voters - 17 percent.

Cuomo denied any linkage between his official decision and poll data. "The suggestion of politics raises the issue of politics," he said. "I want to make sure that this is an investigation that is as free from political influence as possible."

The same Department of Law staffers who have been working on the case will continue to do so, just supervised by Kaye.

Does this change Cuomo's political calendar? Some sources believe it has not, that Cuomo has been expected to announce his run in the next few weeks.

There were gnarly questions in 2007 when Cuomo was called in to probe Gov. Eliot Spitzer's use of state troopers. The attorney general issued a report - but the politics of that case kept talk of prosecutions and referrals and penalties going for years.