If the job of New York's attorney general was just to be a super-prosecutor, any competent district attorney would do. But criminal prosecution is really a small part of the job. What the next attorney general most represents is the people of New York's best shot at good government.

That means both a government that's as clean as we can hope, and one that serves citizens well. That takes more than legal expertise. It takes a mind-set that fully appreciates that the job is about far more than the state's penal law.

Sen. Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, understands that better than his Republican opponent, Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan. He brings the broad view this post demands.
 

Attorney general is the only candidate who has a chance of reforming Albany

In the end, there is no choice for governor but Andrew Cuomo, and it's not just because Carl Paladino burned his own campaign to cinders after scorching Rick Lazio in September's gubernatorial primary.

While it has become trendy to sneer at "career politicians," the fact is that a good one knows his stuff: how to work the levers of power to best advantage; who the players are; where the bodies are buried. Cuomo knows all that and he has laid out an approach for taking the state back from the special interests and the lawmakers they have bought.

Of the two major-party candidates, only Cuomo has a chance of bending the state toward rational decision-making. It won't be easy and Cuomo will have to guard against the old-boy network that helped to produce him, but he has the skills, the background and, if his campaign platform is to be believed, the desire and fortitude to reform an oppressive government that is willfully suffocating the state's economy.

Paladino, by contrast, only has his anger and his money going for him.

In recent years, citizens have come to depend on having an aggressive attorney general who fights special interests and stands up for the common person.

New York's next attorney general must not stray from that role. Both candidates promise not to, but Democrat Eric Schneiderman's comprehensive plans and record of achievements make him the pick by the Democrat and Chronicle in the Nov. 2 general election...

Throughout his career, Schneiderman has shown a passion for seeking justice and helping those in need. After graduating from law school, he worked as a public interest lawyer, doing work such as helping tenants evict drug dealers. He brought that same spirit to the state Senate for the past 12 years. He wrote legislation that ended the overly punitive Rockefeller drug laws, and he worked to get Ian's Law passed — it prohibits insurance companies from dropping sick clients.

Schneiderman is known for being highly ethical. He was one of a few state senators who opposed legislation that led to the failed Aqueduct bidding process because it waived too many lobbying rules. The state's inspector general issued a report last week alleging gross misconduct among Senate leaders. To Schneiderman's credit, he is giving back about $76,000 in campaign contributions from leaders, and he's proposing specific reforms to strengthen oversight of funding decisions.

Certainly a discussion of issues would have been useful. Yet, scandalously, the GOP was unable to field a credible candidate in what is shaping up everywhere else in America as a strong Republican year.

At the outset, there was something refreshing about Carl Paladino, the erratic, energetic political neophyte who took down the Republican establishment.

He won the primary by showing that he understood the frustrations New Yorkers grapple with daily -- and by speaking to them, directly and forcefully.

But he was long on anger and short on answers. (Throwing Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver into Attica may appeal at an elemental level, but it is not a policy prescription.)

Then a screw popped loose.

Paladino revealed himself to be undisciplined, unfocused and untrustworthy -- that is, fundamentally unqualified for the office he seeks.

In addition, his embrace of the utterly bizarre Roger Stone and his execrable Sancho Panza, Michael Caputo, as principal advisers is compelling evidence of a profound ethical myopia.

There have been more murders in Staten Island in every year during Dan Donovan’s time as district attorney than there were in his first year on the job, rising from 8 in 2004 to 16 in 2009, with a peak of 21 in 2008. The number of rapes has also been on the rise in Staten Island, going from 40 in 2004 to 57 in 2009, with a peak of 66 in 2008.

Even accounting for a slight increase in population, this means the overall rape rate in Staten Island has remained static during Donovan’s time as the borough’s top law enforcement official.

This matches a general trend, in an analysis by City Hall of data from the New York Police Department and state Division of Criminal Justice Services, of crime dropping at a much slower rate in Staten Island as compared to the other four boroughs over the six years between Donovan’s swearing-in and the end of 2009.

Citywide, the rate of violent crime dropped nearly 20 percent since 2004, whereas in Staten Island, the overall drop was just over 13 percent. Violent crime dropped on average 3.3 percent every year since 2004 in the Bronx, 5.4 percent in Brooklyn, 6.3 percent in Manhattan and 3.3 percent in Queens. In Staten Island, though, the average decline in the violent crime rate was just .71 percent year-to-year during this period.

This differential between Staten Island and the rest of New York City holds true across all seven major “index” crimes for 2004-2009: murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny and car theft. Despite steep declines citywide and in each of the other boroughs, Staten Island has had a slower than average year-to-year drop in four of the crime categories, while increasing in the numbers and rates of murder, rape and grand larceny, which dropped at least 10 percent in each borough comparing 2004 to 2009, but went up 1 percent in Staten Island.

Carl Paladino, New York’s Republican candidate for governor, likes to portray himself as the political tough guy, the one, as he declared, who can “take a baseball bat to Albany.” Now it appears as though the man who so enjoys dishing it out can’t even take a tough grilling from an irritating reporter.

The latest outburst happened after Mr. Paladino complained that the news media is not investigating the private life of his opponent, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Mr. Paladino, who has acknowledged a daughter from an extramarital affair, suggested to Politico that Mr. Cuomo also had affairs before his divorce seven years ago.

Mr. Paladino did not give any evidence of his charges, and Fredric Dicker of The New York Post later pressed him for details. Their exchange quickly grew heated...

The Paladino campaign has tried to blame Mr. Dicker for this dispute. That misses the point, of course, since Mr. Dicker is not running for governor. And bullying, it is increasingly clear, is Mr. Paladino’s standard operating procedure...

New York State has serious problems. New Yorkers are right to be frustrated and angry about Albany’s corruption and ineptitude. The last thing this state needs is an out-of-control governor who can’t take the heat.

The more New Yorkers get to know Carl Paladino, the less they like him, an exclusive Daily News/Marist Poll found.

Nearly half of likely voters initially said Paladino is unfit to be governor.

That figure jumped to nearly 60% once voters were told of Paladino's rants, such as his plan to bring a baseball bat to Albany and house welfare recipients in converted prisons.

"A lot of people are just getting introduced to Paladino postprimary, and clearly the more they become familiar with this part of his political life, the more negative they feel toward him," Marist Poll director Lee Miringoff said.

Is the Republican candidate for governor of New York a racist, sexist, pornography-loving creep? Or are there other, more benign, explanations for the stomach-turning e-mails distributed by Carl Paladino?

One of the things that can happen in the news business is that some portion of a story becomes so vile, so offensive, it is virtually impossible to effectively recount or describe. Reporters keep their distance. Editors lunge for the delete button.

Such is the case with the images and videos forwarded by Mr. Paladino to a wide variety of people. The public should know about these mailings, and Mr. Paladino should give a full, thoughtful explanation of why he trafficked in such filth.

Example: A photo showing a group of black men trying to get out of the way of an airplane that is apparently moving across a field. The caption reads: “Run niggers, run.”

Example: A doctored photo of President and Mrs. Obama showing the president in a stereotypical pimp’s costume holding the hand of the first lady, who is dressed as a prostitute in a grotesquely revealing outfit.

Example: A video clip of a nude couple engaged in intercourse with the title: “Miss France [expletive].” Mr. Paladino characterized it as “a keeper.”

Example: An image showing a woman performing a sexual act on a horse.

Anti-big government gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino is fighting to hold on to a $1.4 million tax break for a company that created only one job and put back into the economy less than it took out.

In a last-minute bid to keep that lucrative government subsidy, records show he overstated the worth of the company that got the break by including properties he'd already sold off.

The millionaire Buffalo businessman, who last week became his party's candidate for governor, has shaped much of his Tea Party message by railing against government spending and vowing Draconian bureaucratic bloodletting.

At the same time, he's received millions of dollars in tax breaks over the years, mostly as payback for investing in distressed properties in and around his native Buffalo, where manufacturing jobs have disappeared and the economy has long been in a free fall.

The program's incentive was to generate jobs and inject investment into a downtrodden area that would, in the end, offset the sales and real estate tax revenue lost.

It didn't work out that way.

When the tax break began, J-P Group had one full-time employee. By 2008, that number had grown to two.

In 2008, JPMorgan Chase had a problem. A bill that threatened the profits of its lucrative credit card business had the potential to gain momentum in Congress. But the bank had a stable of lobbyists on its payroll ready to plead its case, including a well-connected rainmaker, former Representative Rick A. Lazio.

The bill, which sought to strictly limit increases on credit card interest rates, stalled in Congress, a victory for JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions that issue credit cards. But it is not a victory that Mr. Lazio talks much about these days.

As he campaigns across the state to become the Republican candidate for the governor of New York, Mr. Lazio has played down his work as a lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase, glossing over the subject in his biography posted on his campaign Web site.

More than a decade of New York State governmental dysfunction has taken its toll on all of us. And now, faced with the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the State Government is functionally bankrupt. For too long the State has lived far beyond its means, leading the nation in virtually every major category of public spending.

As the campaign season begins in earnest, New Yorkers owe it to themselves to demand their gubernatorial candidates answer two fundamental questions: "How have you defined your agenda to reform New York" and, the more difficult of the two, "How do you propose to get that agenda passed by the New York State Legislature?"

I answered the first question when I announced my campaign in May, by issuing a comprehensive 250-page policy book called the "New NY Agenda". There, I lay-out a realistic prescription drawn from a diagnosis of the State's dire fiscal situation. We need to clean up Albany, get our fiscal house in order, and make New York the jobs capital of the nation. We need dramatic ethics reform, a property tax and a spending cap to introduce fiscal discipline, and a jobs stimulus plan.

Let's cut to the chase. The Daily News endorses Democrat Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York.

There is no point in taking further stock of the candidates vying for the Republican nomination in next month's primary. Rick Lazio and Carl Paladino have been that awful.

This is a pivotal year for a state groaning under economic duress and crying out for leadership that will overhaul a government that's a dead weight on 18 million people - and corrupt to boot.

But hopes have been dashed that New Yorkers would have a choice between a Democrat and a Republican with robust competing visions and credible potential for delivering on them.

Repeat: Rick Lazio and Carl Paladino have been that awful.