As Liz pointed out in today’s morning memo, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch regretted his mocking of upstate in a 1982 Playboy Magazine interview in which he criticized the area’s “small-town life” and “gingham dresses.”

In fact, Koch told Liz back in 2010 that had he been elected governor over Mario Cuomo that year, he would been the best governor for upstate.

“Wasn’t I stupid? Stupid! Well it wasn’t really a question of changing my mind,” he said in that 2010 interview on Capital Tonight. “It was, I said them, in jest to a reporter who was disparaging the city of New York and I was conveying to him how the city meant so much to me. ”

Koch lost that race in part thanks to a big turn out in western New York for Cuomo, while he narrowly won the city itself. Overall, Cuomo would capture 67 percent of the upstate vote in the Democratic primary and that ill-fated interview in Playboy was given the lion’s share of the blame.

“But in any event, New York State is one of the great, most beautiful states in the union, and had I won the governorship I would have done more for upstate than any governor who, in fact, was elected. It’s outrageous that unemployment is so high upstate.”

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