Mark Green on Kirtzman & Kramer
Mark Green was great just now on the NYC news show Kirtzman & Kramer. Andrew Kirtzman (who is an idiot, but unabashedly so, which is sort of refreshing) kept repeating what he must have thought was the zinger that Green has no prosecutorial experience. In response, Green kept patiently explaining that in fact all of his career has been prosecutorial, but in civil rather than criminal cases, and that 80% of the Attorney General's cases are civil rather than criminal. Unlike KT McFarland, who humiliated herself last week with her response to Kirtzman's similarly aggressive but stupid questions, Green came off like an old pro. Almost dignified, even.
This is the position Mark Green is actually perfectly qualified for, the position his entire career has led up to. And if he hadn't destroyed his reputation with his 2001 mayoral campaign he'd likely be the frontrunner. As it is, though, his candidacy is a joke. It's too bad, because MG was a fantastic public advocate, and he'd probably make a better Attorney General than Andrew Cuomo.
My favorite moment of the interview was watching Green's sour-faced reaction to a Cuomo clip in which Cuomo was beaming at some event with some fat bald guy behind him. The fat bald guy was Stu Loeser, currently Bloomberg's Press Secretary, who was also (as I'm sure the show's producers realized) one of Mark Green's top aides in his 2001 campaign.
Et tu, Brute?
Tags: new york, andrew cuomo, mark green, attorney general, mike bloomberg
This is the position Mark Green is actually perfectly qualified for, the position his entire career has led up to. And if he hadn't destroyed his reputation with his 2001 mayoral campaign he'd likely be the frontrunner. As it is, though, his candidacy is a joke. It's too bad, because MG was a fantastic public advocate, and he'd probably make a better Attorney General than Andrew Cuomo.
My favorite moment of the interview was watching Green's sour-faced reaction to a Cuomo clip in which Cuomo was beaming at some event with some fat bald guy behind him. The fat bald guy was Stu Loeser, currently Bloomberg's Press Secretary, who was also (as I'm sure the show's producers realized) one of Mark Green's top aides in his 2001 campaign.
Et tu, Brute?
Tags: new york, andrew cuomo, mark green, attorney general, mike bloomberg
posted by Solomon Grundy @ 10:25 AM
2 Comments:
At 6:32 AM,
Anonymous said…
If Green (who I prefer) hadn't destroyed his reputation with his 2001 mayoral campaign, he'd be Mayor, and not the front-runner for AG. He'd probably be joining the rest of the party establishment in backing Andrew too.
At 3:41 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
Heh, touche. What I meant was if he had decided not to run for mayor. It was always a bad fit for him. He's just not a likeable guy, and New Yorkers want a mayor they can relate to (even crotchety Koch was a kind of NYC archetype). I can't tell you how many of my friends who only vaguely follow politics called Green "icky" back in 2001.
That has an effect on how journalists cover him, and if he was going to have a chance against a candidate who outspent him by a factor of ten, he needed the press on his side.
For AG, likeability is irrelevant. That's the right position for a smarmy attack dog. Which, contra Green's self-appraisal, is how he comes off to most people.
What's more, centrism doesn't fit Green very well, so all his attempts at moderating his politics for the mayoral campaign backfired. For AG, you don't need to pretend to be centrist. In fact, people like the idea of a populist progressive AG going after the elites.
If he had just waited five years (written a couple books, done some high profile advocacy or something), he'd be a shoo-in today.
Unfortunately, he's the only person in NY who truly believes he's electable for whatever office is vacant in any given year.
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