Tea Party movement member and Republican candidate for Senate from New York Carl Paladino strikes again. I think I’ve figured it out. He’s just trying to get in touch with his inner boor:
Republican Carl Paladino — after days of vowing to get back to the issues — returned to slimy innuendo last night, asserting in a televised message that Democratic rival Andrew Cuomo’s “prowess is legendary.”
The Tea Party-backed candidate made the bizarre sexually suggestive remark after complaining about media investigations into his own affair and in the same breath insisting he didn’t want his campaign to revolve around his accusations of infidelity against Cuomo.
“Do the media ask Andrew such questions?” Paladino said.
“Andrew’s prowess is legendary. No. This campaign must be about bigger issues, not affairs or divorces, because our state is in a death spiral.”
That’s about as sleazy as you can get — particularly because some (short lived) news stories suggested Paladino was going to move away from a line of attack that even GOPers condemned. And Republicans can’t be too happy that Paladino is essentially smothering his own campaign in mud that is smothering his poll numbers — and possibly more:
Veteran GOP political consultant Ed Rollins said Paladino’s “irrational” campaign threatened to sink promising Republican candidates across the ballot.
“This campaign is absurd,” Rollins said. “The Republican Party will take 10 years to recover from this candidacy.”
And, indeed, Tea Party candidates across the nation have been accused by those who don’t agree with them of using hot or demonizing rhetoric. But Paladino’s is in a different class. They make the others sound like Mother Teresa. When she was at church. Praying.
And the impact of his mouth on his own campaign has been devastating and perceptive:
Paladino’s remarks came on the same day that a Quinnipiac University poll found the Republican facing an 18-point deficit.
Cuomo led Paladino 55 to 37 percent among likely voters, compared with 49 to 43 percent just two weeks ago.
The poll found Cuomo reclaiming his lead among independents and showed the share of voters with negative views of Paladino jumping from 31 percent to 49 percent since September.
It’s a campaign of political death by toilet mouth.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.