Duffy vs. Lazio

Calling this “campaigning” is a dis-service to the lowest pols around.
He pulls aside a couple of local hacks that give him a mic and blasts away.
Where’s the ideas, where’s the solutions, where’s the agenda for the future.
And by the way- where’s the crowd????

[[it seems to be that Lazio’s message of this somehow reflecting poorly on his opponent, AG Andrew Cuomo, is getting muddied in the whole debate over whether Duffy’s acceptance of his pension while also taking his mayoral salary is legal/appropriate etc.]]

I don’t think it necessarily is…The key is in the lines from Mayor Duffy early on in the clip, where he says that he’s never heard the Attorney General say that normal public pensions are inappropriate.

In other words…

Lazio: This calls into question Andrew Cuomo’s sincerity on cracking down on abuses of the pension fund.

Duffy: No, it doesn’t, because this isn’t an abuse.

From a political tactics perspective, note that Cuomo is letting Duffy answer this issue himself, and that the responses don’t obviously appear to be funneled through Cuomo’s media/communications operation.

Mayor Duffy seems to be well-spoken and doesn’t appear off-hand to be someone Cuomo will have to worry about “going rogue.” We’ll see, I guess.

What the Mayor’s talking about, about his being put back in the pension system if he refused his police pension?

From everything I’ve read he’s right. The pension system would look at a guy working full-time, refusing his pension, and say “ah ha! This guy isn’t really retired! We better fold his old pension into a new one that he’ll draw when he retires as Mayor.”

Some reporter should call the Comptroller’s Office and confirm this, perhaps? It would be an interesting question.

But, then again, if Duffy’s wrong he can, correctly, say he was misinformed by the personnel people in Rochester, and is thus in effect still more or less blameless.

-The Albany Exile