ALBANY
JUST two weeks to Election Day, Rochester billionaire Thomas Golisano has transformed Upstate into “Golisano Country” with an audaciously expensive media campaign and a tough anti-Pataki message widely seen as right on the mark.
It’s a breathtaking transformation for a region that George Pataki set on fire in 1994 with a stark set of conservative proposals that produced the massive voter turnout that enabled him to defeat then-Gov. Mario Cuomo.
From Buffalo to Albany and from Port Jervis to Rouses Point – which is to say, in that massive area possessed of a sense of economic decay, inevitable property-tax hikes and looming service cuts – grassroots Democrats and Republicans alike are anxiously telling village, town and county political leaders that the locals are angry and restless and lining up with Golisano.
Said a prominent lifelong Democrat in the Albany area, “Even I can’t believe it but I’m actually thinking of voting for Golisano because Carl [McCall] has run such a stupid campaign. It’s an insult and I think my own party should be punished.”
Just yesterday, a top-level aide to one of Upstate’s best known GOP officials wrote a memo stating, “I’m convinced G [Golisano] can win Upstate.
“I’m making sure our folks know that [official’s name] stayed in the pocket on taxes, property rights and guns . . . so that he shouldn’t be lumped in with Pataki.
“There’s anger all around. Very noticeable. People are pissed off in the north and in the woods. So if G gets them out of the house on Nov. 5, he could take Upstate.”
Two polls last week showed Golisano leading McCall among Upstate voters, and one even had him ahead of Pataki.
And those surveys were completed before the climactic phase of Golisano’s unprecedentedly expensive media campaign had even gotten under way.
Insiders expect Golisano to spend an unheard-of $8 million on direct-mail appeals over the next 10 days. And that will come on top of what is now believed to be a massive, $1 million-a-day in television buys.
Some $75 million or so later there’s no telling how big of an Upstate vote Golisano will actually receive.
Democrats, who won an impressive 47 percent of the Upstate vote with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the ticket two years ago, seriously fear Golisano’s Upstate popularity will lead McCall to finish a disastrous third.
Their fears beg this fact: Angry Upstaters – including Upstate Democrats who chose Mrs. Clinton’s offers of help over assurances from Republican Rick Lazio that Upstate was doing just fine, thank you – don’t perceive Carl McCall as championing either their interests or their values.
They don’t even see him as running a campaign, as Golisano surely is.
“The truth is that Golisano is running the kind of campaign Democrats wish McCall had run: aggressive, focused on issues and unafraid of attacking Pataki on such core qualities as integrity,” said longtime Democratic consultant Philip Friedman.
Republicans, meanwhile, fear Golisano’s Upstate surge will block Pataki’s hope to emerge on Nov. 5 with a clear majority of the vote – perhaps crucial if Pataki is to get a shot at running for vice president in 2004.
Instead, a Pataki victory will likely be a minority one, counted in the low- to mid-40s percentile – just this side of a Pyrrhic win.
The major reason for the retreat of Upstate voters from Pataki is well known: Pataki is perceived to have retreated from them.
Whether it is on the macro issues of economic decay, the loss of young people to the South, runaway taxation or the starkly rising crime rates, Pataki is now widely perceived Upstate as just another tax-and-spend Albany politician.
And that negative perception of Pataki is reinforced on many lesser known microissues, some of which are at the very heart of what could be called the Upstate Sensibility, which differs starkly from that found in New York City or its wealthy suburbs.
These micro issues include Pataki’s widely perceived war on legal gun ownership, his greener-than-green environmentalism, his support of dredging PCBs from the upper Hudson River (opposed by most local Republican officials) and his near-full-time focus on New York City-area issues – that is, when he’s not spending time seeking to ban Naval gunnery practice on the island of Vieques.
Pataki’s gamble, of course, was that his political right would stick with him as he veered sharply to the political left. They didn’t, after all, have anywhere else to go.
Until the arrival of Golisano, money bags in hand and skilled political advisers in tow.
The Democratic Party on Row C?
It’s possible, thanks to what may be a new Upstate firestorm.
Fredric U. Dicker is The Post’s state editor.