Richard Brodsky: Get ready for chaos to break out
RICHARD BRODSKY
There wasn't a spontaneous moment at either the Democratic or Republican conventions. The fixers and spinners were in tight control, the scripts were followed. Not to worry. Chaos is about to break out.
If the Republican Party remains the party of guns, extreme social conservatism and tax cuts for the rich, it will hover at its current level of support of 28 percent and could finish third. Rob Astorino has virtues as a candidate;, he's photogenic and well-spoken. But there's almost no evidence about what he truly believes. And there's even less evidence of whether he can, or wants to, pivot on crucial issues and broaden his appeal beyond the roughly one-fourth of New York's voters who are hard right and already in his camp.
If Democrat Andrew Cuomo is rejected by the Working Families Party, a similar kind of meltdown could develop. Polls show Cuomo losing more than 20 percent of the statewide electorate to a credible ideological challenger from the Left.
Cuomo certainly knows how to pivot. But is he willing to do so on the key economic agenda that has defined his first term? Will he run as the Democrat who repealed the bank tax, cut the estate tax, imposed tax and spending caps and became, in education activist Billy Easton's piquant phrase, Governor 1 Percent? What happened to income inequality and the new progressive economics of Bill de Blasio?
http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Richard-Brodsky-Get-ready-for-chaos-to-break-out-5505583.php