Campaign stirs echoes of 1994 midterm election

Echoes of a landmark election year 16 years ago are in the air - not a rerun, necessarily, but echoes.

Halfway into a Democratic president's first term, Republicans are on the march in congressional contests.

Sixteen years ago - also halfway into the last Democratic president's first term - both houses of Congress went Republican.

And this year, the Republican candidate for governor, Carl Paladino, at the Columbus Day parade in New York City, called his opponent a bad dad for bringing his kids to a gay-pride parade. It was part of a bizarre public sideshow he'd launched over the weekend and apologized for on Tuesday.

This, too, recalls the elections of 1994.

That year, during a Columbus Day luncheon speech, Staten Island Republican icon Guy Molinari caused a similar stir by saying the man he supported for state attorney general - Dennis Vacco - was "too much of a gentleman" to make an issue of his opponent Karen Burstein's sexual orientation.

So Molinari took it on himself to do so - declaring at the time that "the next attorney general shouldn't be an admitted lesbian."

Vacco, who went on to win that election, has always denied any role in Molinari's statements and said he told his staff not to echo them. But he wouldn't condemn Molinari, either.

"How do you expect a first-time entrant in a race for public office to control Guy Molinari or the attitudes of all my supporters across the state?" Vacco was quoted then as asking.

George Pataki, the Republican who would unseat Mario Cuomo as governor the following month, said then his ally Molinari should retract the statement. Molinari did not.

Then came the personal part. From California, Molinari's gay brother was quoted as saying: "I'm sorry that he takes that position, but I can't do anything about it."

In the 2010 controversy, Paladino in remarks threw a gay nephew into the public light.

"I have a nephew and my nephew is a wonderful boy and he's gay and I see the difficulty he suffers every day with discriminatory people," Paladino said while in apology mode.

By several accounts, the 23-year-old nephew this week has not showed up at the Paladino campaign, where he'd been working.

Wednesday, Vacco, a fellow Buffalonian and Paladino backer, insisted that his race 16 years ago "wasn't at all about her sexual orientation, but it was about what she was advocating as policy positions."

As for Paladino, Vacco said he mistakenly failed to vet the speech prepared on his behalf before his ultra-Orthodox Jewish audience in Williamsburg - essentially what the candidate has said. Also, Vacco added, "An aspiring elected official needs to be exceedingly careful, especially as a first-time entrant, navigating the diversity of this state."

Burstein - who grew up in Lawrence and has been a state senator, judge and state Consumer Protection Board chairman - said from her Manhattan law office Wednesday that the Molinari remarks and aftermath "may have had an effect on the margins" in her narrow defeat by Vacco that year.

She said she sees progress in public attitudes toward sexual orientation in the past 16 years. Burstein noted that it wasn't until 2000 that New Yorkers even elected a woman - Hillary Rodham Clinton - to a statewide office.

"There has been a sea change in attitudes about sexual orientation," Burstein said, even if "Carl Paladino shows me how far we have not come."