Cuomo Says He’ll ‘Cheer The President On’

Gov. Andrew Cuomo will attend tonight’s debate at Nassau County’s Hofstra University, but he is not on the Obama campaign’s official list of spin-room surrogates.

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Still, the governor told reporters today following the state trooper graduation that he will comment after the town hall-style forum and says he’ll be rooting for the president.

“I’m going to be there,” Cuomo said. “I’m going to watch and cheer the president on and then I’ll comment afterwords. I retain the right to see the performance first before I see the performance.”

Asked what Obama has to do tonight Cuomo said, “Win, basically.”

Cuomo, one of the most popular governors in the country, has not been a prominent public surrogate for President Obama’s re-election effort the same way that potential national candidates such as Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have done over the last year.

Cuomo shuns the national spotlight, mostly out of concern that he will distract from his duties here in Albany and that a Meet the Press appearance here or a Face the Nation hit there will increase speculation that he’s running for president himself in 2016.

He has also declined to spend one night out of the state since being elected, vacationing on Long Island or in the Adirondacks. Cuomo put in a single day’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte to dispel any notion that he is building an infrastructure to run four years from now.

Cuomo did note that the town hall debate tonight will be a different format, so it will be difficult to compare Obama and Republican Mitt Romney to the previous forum in which the president was criticized for appearing listless.

But Cuomo said he expect a somewhat more energetic appearance from Obama this evening.

“I expect it’s going to be a different dynamic and there’s going to be less interchange between the two,” he said. “So I don’t know if you’ll be able to compare the two. So the extent that people felt he was not as engaged or expressive as he was in the first debate I expect he’s going to correct that in this debate.”