Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino has been taunting his primary opponent Rick Lazio over the past week, calling him out for not agreeing to a debate August 30, and even going so far as to threaten to bring a man dressed as a chicken to debate him if Lazio won’t accept the challenge.
Well, it seems the chickens are coming home to roost, because Lazio is now scheduled to attend a candidate forum hosted by TeaParty365 in Manhattan — while Paladino will be upstate for the debate in Syracuse.
According to the New York Observer, Lazio has RSVP’d for the tea party forum at Baruch College.
In a statement released today, Paladino said that “clearly, Rick Lazio is too frightened to appear at a public one-on-one debate with me. Maybe Rick can’t face the voters because he has so many smudges on his lifelong record as a career politician.”
“If Rick Lazio can’t stand the heat now he needs to get out of this race because he’ll never find the guts to confront Andrew Cuomo,” Paladino said.
Paladino has also recently accused Lazio of avoiding a debate because he doesn’t want voters to know about the supposedly shady funding behind his anti-Cordoba House ads: “Just like the developers of the Ground Zero Mosque who are hiding their source of funding, Rick Lazio doesn’t want New Yorkers to know what special interests are bankrolling his advertising.”
The TPM PollTracker shows Paladino making some gains, though Lazio still leads 42.6%-21.6% heading into the September 14 primary.
