A Tea Party Gov Candidate Not Named Paladino

I offer a small reminder that despite the headlines, it's not Carl Paladino.

It's Steve Cohn.

Cohn is an attorney in private practice, registered member of the Independence Party, and, thanks to a few thousand petitions filed with the State Board of Elections, a gubernatorial candidate running on the “Tea Party” line.

“Lets put it this way – the Tea Party nominated me,” Cohn said in an interview Monday afternoon. (He also spoke with WNYC in late August.)

After handing in about 50,000 signatures to appear on the ballot as the Tea Party candidate, Mr. Cohn said, “I think it’s inaccurate” to refer to Mr. Paladino as the Tea Party candidate.

“I have never spoken to Mr. Paladino, but my sense of it is that his policies don’t necessarily reflect the policies along the Tea Party line. Now, we all say we’re against public corruption. It’s easy to say because it sounds good, but it’s hard to endorse it when you might be part of the problem.” Mr. Cohn then went on to rattle off a number of charges levied at Mr. Paladino, a commercial real estate developer who has rented space to government agencies.

“I cannot say whether all the transactions in and of themselves would undergo scrutiny and come out clean,” said Mr. Cohn.

But Cohn offers this surprising defense of Paladino:

“We’ve all forward emails,” said Mr. Cohn. “I’m sure that every single person has gotten emails and forwarded on that may have been cute, funny or may appeal to somebody without any real intent to abdicate the content of the email. So, I think we take things too far and this is just one example of it.”

“If it was just forwarding it on because he got it and just passed it on – I just think it’s making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Mr. Cohn.