By: E&P Staff Rick Karlin of the Times-Union in Albany, N.Y., has created a bit of a buzz in the newly race-sensitive competition between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama by posting the following on the paper's blog, Capitol Confidential:
"I suppose there could be lots of tea-leaf reading in this one, but now its AG [Attorney General] Andrew Cuomo on Talk 1300, minutes after the governor came on. Cuomo, to be fair, has been on the radio show a few times, if memory serves me, but his take on Hillary?s win in NH is that that small-state primary with its retail politics is a good thing. 'It?s not a TV crazed race. Frankly you can?t buy your way into it,' Cuomo said. 'You can?t shuck and jive at a press conference,' he added. 'All those moves you can make with the press don?t work when you?re in someone?s living room.'?
Two commenters at the blog -- and then a host of political Web sites -- have since suggested, rightly or wrongly, that 'shuck and jive' is a thinly veiled racial characterization. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Karlin has since added this to his blog item:
"We?ve been getting calls from the Cuomo people on this who want to point out, correctly, that the AG was not referring to Barack Obama when he used the phrase 'shuck and jive,' but to what politicians in general do with the media. Cuomo?s point was when candidates meet a substantial proportion of primary voters or caucus goers in person, such as in NH or Iowa, there is a certain genuineness that can be avoided in a big-state media-heavy campaign."
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