The Republican tide sweeping across the nation ran into a dam somewhere just inside the New York border, probably around Chatauqua, and the main reason why the state stemmed the flood goes back to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s favorite comment: All politics is local.
That’s why, with the GOP on top from sea to shining sea, all five statewide Democratic candidates won in New York.
Did you watch TV on election night? If you had any doubts about Republican Carl Paladino’s qualifications to be governor, they’d have been dispelled by his rambling bluster in front of his supporters in Buffalo. He giggled, gulped from a water bottle and meandered through his favorite campaign themes — Albany is dysfunctional, taxes have to be cut, Andrew Cuomo is an unqualified insider. Paladino was up there winging it, and it showed.
By contrast, Cuomo had a planned peroration, which, if it never reached the heights of eloquence that used to be displayed by his father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, let him bellow a coherent message and get off the stage to applause.
Those candidate cameos simply confirmed what Quinnipiac and other polls had shown: After his unexpected victory in the GOP primary, Paladino briefly seemed to be within hailing distance of Cuomo — but promptly set off on a Looney Tunes run in which he had a televised dust-up with The Post’s Fred Dicker, “misspoke” about his feelings about gays and displayed almost daily symptoms of foot-in-mouth disease. All politics is local. The local folks in New York made up their minds, and the polls soon showed it.
A couple of other points of note:
* Labor unions and their creation, the Working Families Party, did what political organizations are supposed to do, working effectively on behalf of their candidates, so part of the Democrats’ success here comes from simple, old-fashioned politicking.
* Conversely, the GOP tide circled around that dam in western New York and spilled back to beat Democratic congressional candidates upstate and in the Hudson Valley.
Now, as everyone knows, comes the hard part for Cuomo, confronting an out-of-balance state budget, an out-of-control state Senate and the 800-pound gorilla of Albany, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who is accustomed to having his own way and has the votes to achieve it. Cuomo also has to confront Attorney General-elect Eric Schneiderman, who probably wants to be governor himself someday.
And he has to face the downside of all politics being local: Albany is way up the Thruway, and most New Yorkers don’t pay much attention to what goes on there.
If he’s to succeed at his new job, Cuomo will have to persuade everyone that state government is something locals ought to care about. His father was called Hamlet on the Hudson when it came to running for president; Andrew’s model from Shakespeare now might more likely be Henry V.
Maurice Carroll is director of the Quinni piac University Polling Institute.