Debate the Issues!

So the Democrat and Chronicle demands in this morning's editorial, and it's right.

Debating the issues is exactly what Carl Paladino seeks to do.   It's exactly what Andrew Cuomo seeks to avoid, wan protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, because in a discussion of issues, rather than personalities, he loses.

Yet the D&C denounces Paladino's "verbal grenades," either ignoring, or failing to comprehend, that their purpose is precisely to shame Cuomo into engaging in debate.

Nor can the D&C leave the subject without a tiresome, gratuitous swipe -- that we expect will become automatic -- about Paladino's "racially charged comments in recent weeks."

What "racially charged comments" in recent weeks?   We haven't heard any, and we have to believe that had Paladino made them, that's all the mainstream media would be talking about.

The Democrat and Chronicle's "Fed Up With Albany" campaign has been an ongoing exercise in cognitive dissonance -- simultaneously holding two mutually exclusive thoughts.

The paper's editorialists seem to understand that the tax-and-spend, big government, public employee union-dominated model of state government hasn't worked; that it kills jobs, drives people out of state, burdening those who remain with the nation's highest taxes in an economy more dead than alive.   Yet, acting in accordance with this understanding would force the editorial staff to oppose those candidates and interests whom they are ideologically predisposed to support.

As the election draws nearer, watch the editorials become even shriller than this morning's, as the tension between the paper's two mutually exclusive impulses becomes more troubling for them, and less sustainable.   In the end, as surely as the sun rises in the East, the paper will endorse candidates Andrew Cuomo and Joe Morelle who personify the New York Disease, and others like them.

Meanwhile, back in the world of reality, Paladino has pulled within 6 points of Cuomo in the poll released today.