Opinion

Is Gillibrand the next Weprin?

The shocking Republican landslide in Anthony Weiner’s Brooklyn-Queens congressional district should not only be a wake-up call to President Obama but to New York’s Republicans. They need to get serious and find themselves a creditable and impressive candidate to run next year against incumbent Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

The NY-9 results suggest Gillibrand can be beaten by someone who runs a clever and well-wrought campaign.

Gillibrand hasn’t made the sale with New York’s voters despite having served in the Senate for nearly three years. She was appointed to the seat in 2009, and then won it herself last year against a comically hapless Republican.

In last months’s Siena College poll, her approval rating was only 46 percent — and an incumbent running for re-election with an approval rating below 50 percent is generally deemed vulnerable to defeat.

Even more important, and more threatening to her future, is this: An amazing 30 percent of New Yorkers have “no opinion” of her. That means, as the political consultants say, that she can still be “defined” — and defined negatively.

Since she has no standing of her own in the eyes of New Yorkers, she possesses fewer advantages of incumbency — and in a year when being an incumbent might be a very, very bad thing.

Even more problematic, she’s an Obama Democrat, and that might be a very bad thing too, even in New York.

At the moment, the president is still personally popular in the state — that same Siena poll had his approval rating at 52 percent. But his job-approval rating was a calamitous 36 percent.

It’s difficult to see a turnaround in Obama’s future; the man who has served as his economic Baghdad Bob, Mark Zandi of Moody’s, yesterday threw in the towel: “Unless spirits improve soon,” he said, “the economy will fall back into recession.”

That helps explain why Obama’s most recent effort to make lemonade out of his economic lemons is becoming a political liability for his own party. The president designed his jobs bill to put Republicans in an impossible position — oppose it and be opposed to “jobs” or pass it and give in on tax hikes.

Instead, he has Senate Democrats, many looking at horribly tough elections next year as the party struggles to hold its majority in the chamber, fleeing in horror. The party’s Senate leader, Harry Reid, is responding to Obama’s calls to “pass this bill now” with word that he won’t be taking it up for a while.

“We’ll see,” he said on Wednesday. “Probably at a later time.”

The Republican primary to choose a candidate for Senate against Gillibrand isn’t until next September. The field is open, and the money is there for someone who can inspire enthusiasm. The GOP is unlikely to get a better chance.

It’s quite capable of blowing that chance: A good candidate is unlikely to come from the state party establishment, which is toxic and incompetent.

Of course, the usual names will be bandied about: Rudy, Pataki, Pete King. But they don’t fit the right mold for the year.

I suggest Randy Altschuler. He’s a successful businessman who came within 600 votes of taking Suffolk County’s congressional seat away from the sitting Democrat, Tim Bishop, in 2010. Altschuler is from Manhattan, 41, Jewish, raised by a single mother, public-school-educated and a self-made millionaire who ran a great campaign.

He’s already declared his intention to run for Israel’s seat a second time. He should think about aiming higher. He has the perfect resumé to take on Gillibrand in an anti-incumbent year and the distinct advantage of having been through an electoral trial before.

He’s just one possibility; let a hundred flowers bloom.