Was that the New York gubernatorial debate last night, or did TV stations across the state broadcast some long-lost episode of “The Gong Show”?
Alas, it was the debate. Because if it had been “The Gong Show,” Jamie Farr would have stood up, slammed the gong with the clapper and brought the whole sorry spectacle to an end in about 20 seconds.
If it had been “The Gong Show,” an embarrassed Carl Paladino would have performed the entire time with a paper bag over his head and declared himself “The Unknown Republican Candidate.”
If he had, he might actually get some votes on Election Day.
Certainly, Paladino didn’t win over any voters with his halting and confused answers; twice he lost his train of thought and burst into nervous laughter, and he couldn’t keep Medicare straight from Medicaid.
JIMMY McMILLAN, the amazingly bearded and mustachioed candidate of the (I’m not kidding) Rent is Too Damn High Party, would have been gonged into silence by Jaye P. Morgan after announcing that our economic condition “is like a cancer” and will, therefore, “be healed by itself” just so long as we listen to “Mister Barack Obama.”
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate, spoke many words of leftist populism, but the audience couldn’t hear them because they were too busy deciphering his bizarre accent, which sounded like a combination of Goober from “The Andy Griffith Show” and Samuel L. Jackson.
This despite the fact that Hawkins is from San Francisco, graduated from Dartmouth and has lived in Vermont and Syracuse most of his adult life.
CHARLES BARRON, the Black Panther who has spent years embarrassing himself and his native Brooklyn as a New York City councilman, was mostly notable last night for his Nehru jacket, joined together with large buttons.
At least Barron’s jacket was black. Several of the other candidates — Paladino, Hawkins and Libertarian Warren Redlich — dressed themselves in green sports jackets, which you ordinarily don’t see outside the Masters golf tournament.
Redlich offered a sensible and low-key defense of the smaller-government approach, only most of the time, his voice shook with terror, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was sitting there on the stage.
Or maybe he was shaking with disbelief at the preposterous spectacle around him.
IT IS a mark of the low comic absurdity of last night’s lolla palooza that there were only two people who sounded even minimally comfortable last night, and one of them was a hooker — Kristin Davis, the former “Manhattan Madam” who talked about the danger of high taxes when she wasn’t reading ghostwritten one-liners about the difference between her brothel and the MTA from a cheat sheet in her lap.
The other person who seemed in his element was Andrew Cuomo, who will be the next governor of this state unless a comet strikes the Earth and renders us all extinct before Nov. 2.
Cuomo was pedaling easily back to the center he had seemed to abandon in the weeks following Paladino’s surprise victory and momentary surge in the polls.
He had the self-satisfied mien of a winner who knew perfectly well he was the only one on stage who isn’t going to get the gong.