A specter haunts Rick Lazio.

It hovers at the Women’s Republican Club, a plumy, gilded gathering hall near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, a posh place where the walls are lined with oil paintings of past club presidents. Lazio is slated to appear at a candidate’s night there hosted by the Manhattan Young Republicans club. A nor’easter has blown in, and outside the city is cold and dark and wet.

Lynn Krogh, president of the Young Republicans, introduces Lazio, specter and all.

“I’m personally very excited about this race,” she says. “Regardless of who else gets into this race, I’m personally very excited about this race, and as someone who has worked in the executive chamber, I am looking forward to seeing you”—she catches herself—“or, at the very least, a Republican in the executive chamber in January, 2011.”

Lazio has not been seen by most New Yorkers for nine years, not since his 12-point drubbing by Hillary Clinton in 2000. His mistake then, he and many believe, was that he dropped out to give the stage to Rudy Giuliani, only to have America’s mayor return the favor and abandon the race himself with only five and a half months to go.

But while he disappeared to most of the world, he did not to the Young Republicans. He regularly attended their annual dinners and even hosted it one year as part of his steady presence on the rubber chicken circuit. He may not have been basking in the limelight, but he has, in a very unusual way, been laying the groundwork for another run.

Lazio launches into a story about his first run for Congress against an 18-year incumbent whom he ended up defeating handily. Early on, the campaign was going poorly, and a friend of his, a dinosaur hunter, sent him a picture of a dinosaur bone with the words “P.M.A is the key” written on the back.

“Positive Mental Attitude,” Lazio explains.

A woman standing in the back Googles on her BlackBerry “How old is Rick Lazio?”

Fifty-one is the answer. His famously boyish face now framed with flecks of gray, at the age when most people make their first statewide run, Lazio is mounting an improbable comeback for his second, with close to a decade in the corporate world in his pocket and the foibles of 2000 still on everybody’s mind. Little Ricky, as Maureen Dowd so devastatingly capped him, is all grown up.

Ask Lazio what he learned from the race in 2000, and he has a ready answer: “Stay at the podium,” he says with a laugh.

He is referring to that fateful moment in his first debate with Clinton—covered by the international media and moderated by Tim Russert—when he walked across the stage brandishing a sheath of papers for Clinton to sign that would restrict both candidates from raising soft money. He ended up losing by a wider margin than anyone had expected.

Before that race, Lazio was considered one of the bright lights of the Republican Party. He was young, a fiscal conservative and social moderate elected by large margins in a swing suburban district. He shot up the ranks of congressional leadership, eventually becoming deputy whip and assistant majority leader.

By the time then-Gov. George Pataki shoved him out of the race to make room for Giuliani, he was fully ready to go.

He did not take great care to hide his feelings about the decision.

“I am the better candidate. I am ready to get into this race,” he said flatly at the time. “But I am doing right now what is in the best interests of the Republican Party.”

And now, as Lazio makes the case that he is the man who should lead Albany, all anyone can talk about is whether he will be forced aside again by Giuliani.

History is supposed to repeat itself, but not this neatly.

“Lazio’s problem back then was that he was seen as everybody’s second choice,” says one political operative close to both Giuliani and Lazio. “That’s his problem now, too. It’s really hard when everybody sees you as the second choice.”


Ask Lazio what else he learned from 2000, and he has another ready answer: “Start earlier.”

“Every campaign makes mistakes,” he said in a midtown Manhattan diner over a lunch of iced tea and plain rice pudding, “and you want to make them early, before everybody is watching—and then when you go down the homestretch, you want to have a well-oiled machine.”

Lazio first started reaching out to state Republicans around the beginning of the year. Back then, Gov. David Paterson was still, at least by comparison, somewhat popular and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was not yet at the level of just being assumed to be the next Democratic nominee.

Part of the motivation, people close to the Lazio campaign say, was to scare out Giuliani, to force him to reveal his intentions, and, if he dithered, to secure enough money and institutional support to crowd him out of the race.

“He was working the back rooms and I think he heard everybody say, ‘Let’s wait and see what Rudy does,’” said one Republican operative. “I think he made a conscious decision to change that strategy and try to go out there and take a higher profile and get some earned media.”

It has been slow going. The campaign has secured one endorsement so far: Suffolk County chair John Jay LaValle, local poobah of Lazio’s home turf.

Lazio hauled in $40 million in a matter of months in 2000, and his supporters say they think Lazio can bring in the big bucks again. But they remain stifled by the perception that Giuliani may still jump in the race.

That may not be the only problem. Lazio is counting on having the same kind of support he enjoyed in 2000. But he is missing the fact, many Republicans say, that the magic that year was not in him, but in the fact that he was running against Hillary Clinton, back when she was the right wing’s archenemy and a carpetbagger to boot.

“We could have put a fucking donkey up there and raised $40 million,” said one GOP operative who worked on the campaign. “The problem Rick is going to have is that the money you raise to run for governor comes from law firms and real estate interests, and those guys will be with Andrew if Rudy isn’t running.”

Republican strategists say Lazio needs $2-3 million by the end of the year.

The campaign said they expect to have at least $1 million by then.

“Rick Lazio’s challenge right now is to convince funders that he has a chance,” said one Republican. “And if he doesn’t raise money early, it will only compound the problem.”

And Giuliani supporters say that no matter how well Lazio does in the early going, the Mayor could jump in as late as the spring and become the immediate frontrunner.

“Any poll has us crushing him,” said one. “I don’t care if he has all 62 county chairs. The minute Rudy gets in, they all jump on board with him.”

Privately, many Lazio supporters do not think that Giuliani will run, but still, they seethe that Lazio’s ambitions may be thwarted by the same guy again. They look at Giuliani’s heavy-handed involvement in the intra-party struggle to pick the next chair—a struggle Giuliani lost—while other statewide contenders stayed neutral as proof that Giuliani is not serious. According to one lawmaker close to Lazio, Giuliani has privately expressed to Lazio that he is unlikely to run again.

Then they read the coy statements Giuliani has made in the press and scratch their heads.

“The quotes in the paper don’t seem to be in line with what he has said privately,” said a Lazio supporter. “He can always change his mind, but their belief is that he is not going to do it.”

Many of the GOP faithful find themselves tired of the Giuliani song and dance.

“Republicans are fooling themselves if they think Rudy Giuliani is running for governor,” said Conservative Party chairman Mike Long, who is close to Lazio. “If he were serious about it, he would have to be in the mix right now, and he is not.”

In an odd way, Giuliani’s will-he-or-won’t-he dance is helping Lazio, since other prominent Republicans including Erie County executive Chris Collins, Staten Island district attorney Dan Donovan and Long Island Rep. Peter King are all waiting for Giuliani to make up his mind, and have indicated that they will only run if Giuliani does not.

But not Lazio.

“Rick has grown and learned a lot in the last 10 years. And one thing is: if you feel strongly about something and you have the right message, you don’t wait on what other folks are doing,” said one campaign aide. “We decided what we were early, and we decided to go ahead.”

Still, few really believe him.

During Lazio’s eight-city statewide kickoff tour, he was asked repeatedly at press conferences if he would drop out of the race if others got in.

“I am not only in this race,” he said in a typical exchange after the campaign kickoff announcement in Albany. “But in it until the end.”

Lazio is in an odd bind; he believes there is about a one-in-three chance that Paterson is the Democratic nominee. But as Paterson sits on approval ratings in the low teens and Democrats wait for Cuomo to make his move, political professionals say Paterson staying in the race is the number-one thing that can derail Lazio’s quest to the Republican nomination. If Paterson does become the nominee, then a host of prominent Republicans, including Giuliani, Pataki, or Florida billionaire Tom Golisano could rush to face him and knock Lazio aside.

“People like winners,” said one GOP operative close to Giuliani but who says he likes Lazio personally. “People say Rick is great, but he is a loser. There isn’t much stomach right now for a guy to get 18 points.”

Right now, Lazio trails in polls to Paterson, a fact that the Lazio campaign attributes to his low name recognition. But Lazio’s name ID is one of the reasons his supporters think he should run again, since it gives him a leg up against a fresher face. More worryingly for Lazio supporters is that he does not fare that much better than Collins, whose statewide name recognition is close to zero.

Lazio has been considering his options, and clearly, the best one is to end up squaring off against Paterson. If he does, he said, the message is simple: Paint the governor as erratic. Let voters know that even President Barack Obama does not think Paterson should be governor. Point to the circus Albany has become in the past year, and say, “See what this governor has wrought!”

Lazio has already been trying out the message.

“There were a lot of people who were hopeful with his rhetoric, and they see him say we can’t afford any more taxes, we’ve got to change the way we do business in Albany, and then he signs a budget which is one of the worst budgets New York has ever had,” he says. “You are sending a message that New York is no longer open for business. He says things many of us agree with from time to time, but his follow-through is inadequate.”


The odd thing about a potential Cuomo-Lazio match-up—besides the fact that they are both 51-year-old Italian-Americans who look remarkably alike—is how different Cuomo’s path to the governor’s race is from Lazio’s.

Cuomo also failed miserably in a bid for statewide office in the beginning years of this decade. In his aborted 2002 race for governor, he managed to anger virtually every core Democratic constituency. Afterwards, his marriage to Kerry Kennedy ended with highly publicized revelations that she cheated on him. His political obituary was written, the power of his famous name salted over.

But Cuomo immediately set to work methodically plotting his comeback. He stayed involved. He met with donors and Democratic bigwigs one by one. And then, the next chance he got, he snatched a lower, intermediate prize.

And now Cuomo finds himself leading the sitting governor in polls by 50 points. He has used his perch to become a media darling and a national spokesman for hot-button financial issues. His office has been a sober, efficient, counter-example to the governor’s tenure.

Lazio has had plenty of his own chances to get back into the game.

In 2002, Washington Democrats tried to get him to run for his old House seat. Many think he would have won easily, but he demurred. In 2006, state Republicans practically begged him to run for attorney general, but again he declined. Offers to run for the county executive of either Nassau (which would have required a conveniently timed move of his own) and Suffolk came up as well, but Lazio turned them down too.

Friends say he was chastened by the 2000 loss. But though he sat back for a while, no one really thought he was done. He was just waiting, they say, for the right time.

He made a pile of money working for JP Morgan Chase, but he has left himself open to criticism that he was basically a lobbyist for investment bankers at a time when respect for Wall Street is at an all-time low and his likely opponent made his name by exposing banker’s malfeasance.

Lazio said that he has stayed involved in various boards and causes, especially around the issues he worked on in Congress, namely housing and the environment.

Indeed, he was recently a special guest at the Long Island branch of the League of Conservation Voters’ Champions of a Greener Nassau County Cocktail Party. The honor, though, did not come because he has been a particularly active champion of their work, said Marcia Bystryn, executive director of the group.

“Frankly, we don’t know him that well,” she said. “I think he’s terrific, but we have not been working closely with him while he was at JP Morgan Chase.”

So there is the easy attack line: if Cuomo tries to paint Lazio as an absent public figure and part of Wall Street corruption, Lazio will try to paint Cuomo as the caricature of a cigar-chomping, backroom politician and try to hang Albany around his neck.

“Andrew has been at the heart of Democratic politics in Albany for the past 25 years,” he says. “To believe that he is going to be a change agent, and lower taxes and take on the special interests, is not credible.”

When Lazio ran against Hillary Clinton, he was criticized in certain quarters for making the race all about her and carpetbagging, and not enough about his record. This time around, Lazio has less of a record since all of his legislative achievements are more than a decade old. But he has already brought back Arthur Finkelstein, the famous brass-knuckles tactician whose credits include helping elect Jesse Helms, founding Stop Her Now, a 527 committee dedicated to derailing Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions, and popularizing the use of the word “liberal” as a political slur.

The strategy under development is to get under Cuomo’s skin in an effort to bring out the once notoriously hotheaded politician. By contrast, genial Rick Lazio will look like the right, even-keeled man for the job.

“If Andrew Cuomo is the nominee, it will be a very different Andrew Cuomo out on the campaign trail than people see now,” Lazio said. “He’ll be a candidate. He’ll have to take positions and be under pressure. There are unexpected things that happen in the course of a campaign. How people respond to that matters. History is replete with early favorites that fizzled.”

Democrats are dubious.

“He would be better off playing the nice guy role. He can do, ‘Aw shucks, I’m just out here running hard’ pretty well,” said Democratic consultant Kyle Kotary. “You don’t want to get into a street fight with Andrew Cuomo. He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s faster, and he hits harder.”

Lazio hopes that his time away from politics will be seen as a strength.

“I’ve been a dad, I’ve raised two daughters, I’ve spent time with my wife, I’ve raised a family,” he says. “What do you want in government? People that have had no life, or people that have had a life experience in the broadest sense so when you create a rule or a law or policy, you understand how it affects them?”

The political ranks are filled with people who got rich before turning to public service, but for the most part they were entrepreneurs, not government affairs specialists for international financial concerns. Some Republicans wonder why Lazio did not try to have President George Bush appoint him to a commission to tout when he goes before voters again.

The upside is that Lazio is one of the few Republicans who do not have ties to former president George Bush. And his campaign is using his time away from government to position Lazio as the “change” candidate of big ideas, and he talks a lot about wholesale structural reforms like adopting a unicameral legislature and calling for a constitutional convention.

This is all part of a new message: Lazio as the citizen politician, stepping forward because he is heeding the call. The ineffectiveness of state government led him to leave the comforts of a happy corporate life, he said, and he can no longer accept anything but a complete and fundamental reordering of Albany. He wants to, in essence, blow up state government and start over.

“The unicameral legislature is a game changer,” he says. “How do you fundamentally rethink the structure of government? We need to look through our government and ask what we would do if we had to build it from the bottom up.”

He thinks that his time away from Albany will enable him to work with the Legislature in a way that others have been unable to, and that his time in Congress gives him insight into how legislators think.

His governing philosophy is managerial moderate Republicanism. He favors civil unions, but not gay marriage. He wants Rockefeller Drug Law reform, but not as far as this Legislature went. He does not want new taxes, or an MTA bailout or new spending. He is pro-environment, pro-civil rights. He wants a leaner state government, one that plans for the future instead of lurching from crisis.

“The reason I felt like I was elected 2-1 in a swing district is because people felt I had balance,” he says. “People looked at me and said, ‘Here is a guy who is willing to make the difficult decisions on spending, who was creating jobs, who was working with the other side, who is not hyper-partisan and who has a social conscience.’”

Republicans are a dwindling minority in New York State, but Lazio’s supporters think a national wave, fed by revulsion with Obama and congressional Democrats, and a throw-the-bums-out attitude towards Albany will give them a bump. His supporters think his similar demographic profile to Cuomo’s will neutralize part of the attorney general’s base. The campaign is counting on pulling out a quarter of the vote in New York City, running heavily in Queens and Staten Island, and eking out wins in Westchester and Erie Counties. They think they can get double-digit victories on Long Island—even if they do not do as well there as they did in 2000, if they run 2-1 in the remaining upstate counties, they project a narrow, 51-49 victory.

And perhaps more importantly than anything he can do for himself, they think he might be able to buoy a few State Senate candidates in Nassau and Suffolk just enough to help with the 2010 last-chance effort to retake the majority.

“If you look at any people that have reached the highest office, all of them have been defeated at some point. Bill Clinton ran for attorney general and lost—but you know what, he thought about what happened to him on the campaign trail and the issues and came back and made the case to the people of Arkansas, which was appealing enough for them to return him to office. And the same for both Bushes. Barack Obama ran for Congress and lost. So you know, it’s a long history of people that have come up short at some point in their life.”

This is, of course, pretty elite company. But if Lazio pulls off one of the most improbable comebacks in political history, he will be a Republican governor from a large Democratic state, and be considered a national Republican leader. Stranger things have occasionally happened in politics. Many of them have occurred in New York these past few years.

And he is already looking the part, shaking off the dust.

At the Columbus Day Parade in New York City earlier this month, Lazio, who had not marched in a big city parade in nearly a decade, leapt right back into the fray, waving and smiling as a campaign aide frantically tried to stay ahead of him, passing out “Lazio for New York” campaign posters to the few people who would take them.

“What are you running for?” a parade-watcher shouted.

“Governor!” Lazio answered back. “Next year!”

In front of St. Patrick’s, he greeted Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

“Make sure you come back for St. Patrick’s Day!” he said.

In front of the Pierre, he finally caught up to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for a photo op.

Near the end, around the Metropolitan Museum, Lazio found himself alone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Cuomo and Paterson were somewhere, either further ahead or further behind. Giuliani was nowhere to be seen. A long, empty stretch of Fifth Avenue lay before him.

Rick Lazio kept walking.

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above photos by Andrew Schwartz