Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rick Lazio faces two key deadlines Thursday, either of which could signal the end of his long-shot hope of defeating Andrew Cuomo.
First, Lazio, a Wall Street lobbyist and former Long Island congressman who lost a Senate race to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2000, will have to tell the state Board of Elections how much money he’s raised since Jan. 15, when he reported having a mere $637,000 in the bank (compared to $16.1 million for Attorney General Cuomo).
Well-informed Republican activists predict Lazio will report a war chest of little more than $1 million — compared to as much as $20 million expected for Cuomo.
Second, Lazio will find out if Buffalo real-estate mogul Carl Paladino has the 15,000 Republican signatures he needs to run against him in the September primary.
Many GOP insiders predict the hard-driving Paladino, who promises to spend $10 million of his own money and has strong ties to the highly motivated Tea Party movement, can beat Lazio in the primary.
But even if he doesn’t win, a well-funded Paladino would force Lazio — who is so widely perceived as a loser to Cuomo that big-money Republican contributors have stayed away in droves — to spend badly needed resources just to get the GOP nomination.
“If Paladino gets on the ballot, which I believe he will, then Lazio will spend the next two months squandering what little money he has on a primary, with Cuomo just sitting back and enjoying the summer,” said one of the state’s best-known Republican activists.
Paladino said last week that he’ll report about $1 million raised and spent so far — all of it from his own deep pockets. And he predicted he’d have no problem getting on the GOP ballot.
Lazio spokesman Barney Keller would say only, “We will file when we file,” when asked how much money his candidate has raised during the past six months.
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So is Lazio opposed to the controversial Cordoba House mosque near Ground Zero or not?
That was the question asked by many in the political community after he danced around the question at a midweek press conference.
Spokesman Keller insisted Lazio is unequivocally against the project, telling The Post a day earlier, “Rick Lazio opposes the plan.”
But Lazio repeatedly seemed to duck the question during the press conference, saying, “Well, I think this mosque, I think there are questions involving this mosque.
“The purpose, why this mosque is being built by the people that are proposing to build it: That’s what we have before us right now.”
The comments led The Associated Press to initially report, “Lazio refused to say whether he opposes the construction of any mosque so close to the Sept. 11 attack site.”
After a protest and assurances from Keller, the story was changed to say Lazio does, indeed, oppose the mosque.
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Senate Democratic Leader John Sampson of Brooklyn emerged “weaker than ever” from the recently ended regular session of the Legislature, putting aside the considerable negative fallout from last week’s disclosure of his newly purchased, $49,000 “Sampsonmobile.”
“Sampson can’t deliver his conference, he can’t deliver on his word, and he seems at times to not even know what’s going on,” was how a key official close to Senate Democrats put it.
Several insiders contended that Bronx Sen. Jeff Klein, who hopes to become the Democrats’ leader next year, gained power during the confusing final days of the session, when he blocked Sampson’s bid to bring the final budget bill to a vote.
Klein insisted the final deal allow City and State University campuses to set their own tuition rates, an issue deemed crucial to the re-election of at least two Democratic senators but opposed by the Assembly’s Democratic leadership.