Chris Churchill
New York won’t get the attorney general it really needs.
■ Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518-4545442 or email cchurchill@ timesunion. com
Do you want to hear a conspiracy theory? Of course you do. Everybody loves conspiracy theories, though they rarely are true.
This one involves New York’s now-completed Democratic primary for attorney general, and it focuses mostly on two of the four candidates in the race: Sean Patrick Maloney and Zephyr Teachout. Both lost to Tish James, the preferred candidate of Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The theory, popular among some Teachout supporters and floated in published reports, posits that Maloney, 52, a Hudson Valley congressman, was not in the race to win and instead ran to keep Teachout from victory — as a stalking horse, essentially, who siphoned away upstate votes.
Maloney’s camp scoffs at the notion.
“Sean ran for the AG because
he thought he would be good at the job and that it presented the chance to do more for New York,” spokesman Ian Eli Lee said. “We understand that folks are disappointed, but this blame-game conspiracy theory is both absurd on its face and demeaning to Tish.”
Certainly, there are reasons to think the conspiracy is nutty. Maloney spent more than $3 million on the race and, according to a Siena poll, was a late front-runner. That would be quite an effort for a candidate with no real interest in winning.
But there are also reasons why the theory had some juice.
For one, you can bet the Albany establishment was rooting against Teachout, who has made combating public corruption the focus of her career. Cuomo, in particular, might have preferred an extensive root canal to having Teachout as attorney general — which, as far as I’m concerned, was reason enough to hope for her victory.
Then, there was the unusual and problematic nature of Maloney’s campaign. He was running for attorney general while
running to keep his seat in Congress. That understandably raised questions over whether his heart was truly in either job.
And those millions Maloney spent during the primary?
Some of the money was given to him for his congressional race by Democratic donors who presumably wanted to ensure that a district won by Donald Trump stayed blue. Instead, the money was spent to take on fellow Democrats. (Teachout’s campaign insisted that transferring money from a federal to a state race was improper; Maloney’s camp disagreed.)
Meanwhile, Maloney ran a race light on public appearances, choosing instead to let television advertising do his talking. Even in the final days of the race, when he presumably would have been energized by that Siena poll, Maloney hardly hit the campaign trail — a dubious strategy, for sure.
Last week, I talked to Teachout about the race and the results. I should stress that she did not float the conspiracy theory, nor did she give it much weight when I asked what she thought.
But Teachout, 46, a law professor at Fordham, did raise objections to Maloney’s campaign, calling it both unethical and cynical.
“It was wrong to run for two offices at once, and it was disrespectful to voters not to campaign and to rely on television advertising,” Teachout said. “If you want to run for AG, then run only for AG and talk to voters.”
In the end, Maloney finished third with 25 percent of the vote. James, who will face Republican Keith Wofford in the general election, easily won the primary with nearly 41 percent to Teachout’s 31 percent. Leecia Eve, a fourth candidate, received less than 4 percent.
James, the heavy favorite to win in November, dominated in New York City but did terribly upstate, where Maloney and Teachout largely split the vote. It probably isn’t the case that Maloney’s presence on the ballot cost Teachout a victory — she would have needed 70 percent of the votes he received to win — but it certainly complicated the race for her.
Teachout, who previously lost races for governor and Congress, told me she won’t run for another office. Attorney general was the job she really wanted, she said. It was the position that suited her best.
For conservatives and liberals alike, there’s reason to regret Teachout’s defeat and that Wofford’s chances are so slim.
As is obvious to anybody who is paying attention, Albany needs an independent attorney general willing to look into the dark corners of the Capitol and challenge the state’s endemic culture of corruption. New York needs somebody to take on a status quo that benefits entrenched power at the expense of good government.
James, an establishment candidate who owes a debt to Cuomo, will not be that person. Teachout would have been. Preet Bharara would have been too, if only he had deigned to run.
Maloney, meanwhile, is now campaigning for Congress in his Hudson Valley district, where, all conspiracies aside, voters are unlikely to hold his run for attorney general against him.