Randy Daniels Wants to Be Pataki
African-American ex-Dem tests the big tent.
Can Secretary of State Randy Daniels make it as the black George Pataki? Now that Pataki’s a no-go, the former CBS News foreign correspondent is the default 2006 GOP front-runner (no one else is in the race yet). And sources say Daniels’s political operative, former Pataki campaign manager Robert Ryan, is staffing up Daniels’s operation with other key Pataki alumni: notorious oppo-researcher Gary Maloney (who dug into Bill Clinton’s draft-dodging, pot-smoking past), election lawyer Larry Mandelker, and fund-raiser Patrick Donohue. Daniels is battling GOP insiders who worry he’ll never beat Eliot Spitzer. But Daniels points out that party bigs laughed at the little-known Pataki’s hopes in 1994, adding that the time is ripe for a black GOP candidate. “The party leadership wants an upstater who’ll pump the GOP’s traditional suburban and upstate base,” he says. “But New York’s changed. Upstate’s losing population, and middle-class minorities are turning the suburbs Democratic. If the state GOP doesn’t become big-tent, it will die.”
—G.S.

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