GOP take on Senate seat? Cuomo
ALBANY — There has been no shortage of political oracles giving unsolicited advice these days to Democratic Gov. David A. Paterson about whom he should name as a successor to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Add an unlikely source: the chairman of the state Republican Party. “I think Andrew Cuomo is a formidable candidate,” Joseph N. Mondello, the GOP boss, said when asked who would be the most challenging Democrat his party would have to face in 2010 when the seat that Clinton will relinquish would go before voters.
Cuomo was the only name Mondello mentioned of more than a dozen floated as possible successors to Clinton, who has been nominated for secretary of state.
“If I were Paterson, I could see a number of reasons why I would do it,” Mondello said of choosing Cuomo. “One would be to get him out of the way,” he said in reference to Cuomo’s long desire to be governor, a job Paterson said he wants to run for in 2010 for the first time after assuming the office when Eliot L. Spitzer resigned.
“Another is the fact that he has a very famous name and he’s an individual who carries some weight in the party. He’s had some prestigious positions and, frankly, would have a good shot at success,” Mondello said of Cuomo, who was elected state attorney general in 2006. “We’d need the right candidate to run against him.”
Paterson is under pressure to appoint a Clinton successor who will be strong enough to win election in 2010 to fill the remaining two years in the term — and possibly someone with enough name recognition within the Democratic Party to avoid a nasty primary battle.
Mondello was here Wednesday to join with county GOP leaders to begin picking up the pieces now that his party is out of power in every major post in state government. While some Senate Republicans are still trying to cut deals with three potential Democratic renegades in the Senate — who are being offered plum posts in return for helping the GOP keep the Senate in January — Mondello said the prospect of those efforts succeeding is “remote.”
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