Carl Paladino for Governor

Carl Paladino will be launching this week the final push of his campaign for governor, and The New York Sun is happy to extend its endorsement. We understand the Republican nominee is being set down as “Crazy” Carl by, among others, the same newspapers who, while saying they were for tax cuts and reform in Albany, endorsed Eliot Spitzer. It doesn’t take a double-blind study to see that Mr. Paladino is politically inexperienced and has his personal flaws. But it is also the case that he is the candidate who more clearly comprehends the catastrophe that has engulfed the state and more faithfully hews to the principles of political economy that will have to be at the center of any effort to turn it around.

Much has been made by Mr. Paladino’s opponents of emails he has sent or forwarded that contain off-color and racialist attempts at humor. They are as offensive to us as to anyone else. They remind us, however, of nothing so much as the private letters that were discovered to have been written by Harry Truman (about which we wrote during the 2008 presidential campaign in an editorial called “How To Judge Obama).” In their references to Jews, African Americans, and Asians, Truman’s letters were coarse beyond the point that one can describe in a family newspaper. Yet Truman went on to recognize Israel and integrate the armed services. Such episodes have taught us of the need to judge our public officials less by their private prejudices than by their public acts.

Mr. Paladino strikes us — we spent two hours with him last week at a small gathering in Manhattan — as a man for whom such a distinction is apt. When invited to speak, he began by falling silent to formulate his thoughts. He then spoke of his father calling him over to his deathbed to apologize for being unable to leave him an inheritance of wealth. He recounted his own education and his years practicing law and his success in business. He spoke of the death, a year ago in an automobile accident, of one of his sons, and the way he formed his own commitment to make a run for public life. If he loses this or any other quest, he noted, it won’t be even close to the worst thing that happened to him.

Mr. Paladino also spoke of his mistakes in the campaign, including his comments about homosexuals in the meeting with the Chasidim in Williamsburg. He regretted not confining his remarks to the issue of same gender marriage and failing to express what he so clearly conveyed to this small group, his evident warmth toward homosexual colleagues, family, and friends. It was after his remarks in Williamsburg that Mr. Cuomo suggested Mr. Paladino is a bigot. Mr. Paladino was asked why he didn’t demand to know whether Mr. Cuomo also thought that Orthodox Jews — and, for that matter, religious Catholics — were also bigots. He confessed he was not good at such repartee.

Mr. Paladino has, in any event, concluded he doesn’t want to have that argument in the campaign or in government but rather to focus on the big issue before voters, which is the state’s budget catastrophe and the culture of government entitlement in Albany. Here Mr. Paladino was more sure of foot and, in our view, more credible than Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Cuomo’s political party. Mr. Paladino turns out to be not only a businessman but a lawyer. He is a student of not only the American Constitution but — and he spoke convincingly on this head — also the constitution of New York State. He comprehends that the state constitution gives the upper hand in the budget process to the governor.

Though Mr. Paladino recognizes it would be a difficult fight, he evinces the grit that will be needed to maximize that advantage. He has budget goals and a timeline of governance. He has an upstater’s sympathy for those stranded by the kind of desolation that has been created by the tax-and-spend policies of the Democrats. He insists he wants but one term and intends, thereafter, to go back to his business. There is no doubt that the received wisdom is that the campaign is at a point where Mr. Paladino is going to lose no matter what happens — so that the better strategy is to endorse the likely winner. It’s the same thinking that got us Governor Spitzer. So we recommend a vote on the merits for Mr. Paladino.