Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Carl P. Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor, hailing a cab in Manhattan on Monday. He expects to spend a lot of time campaigning in and near New York City.
Paladino Campaigns in a Borough He Mocked
Carl P. Paladino, the tough-talking Buffalo businessman and Republican nominee for governor, has done little to hide his distaste for Manhattan.
He has disparaged its traffic-clogged streets. He has mocked its liberal-leaning residents. And in a stinging rebuke to the Manhattan-centric, he has expressed a blunt preference for Staten Island and Queens.
But on Monday, Mr. Paladino held his nose long enough to make a brief campaign swing in Manhattan, determined to navigate it with the same rumpled everyman style and resolute anti-elitism with which he has campaigned to be the state’s chief executive.
He succeeded, up to a point. He insisted on sitting in the front seat of a taxi as it whizzed through Midtown (back seats, after all, evoke chauffeurs). He stayed at an unassuming hotel in the garment district. And he devoured an antipower breakfast: eggs, sausage and butter-soaked toast at an out-of-the-way diner.
But he became star-struck in the lobby of the CBS Building on West 57th Street when he stumbled upon a glamorous British actress.
A reporter pointed her out to Mr. Paladino as a star of “The English Patient.” The gruff, aggressive candidate gasped, saying he liked the film, and rushed over to introduce himself.
“I’m Carl Paladino,” he said. “I loved, what was that movie?” he asked the reporter. “ ‘The English Patient,’ ” he said, with a prompt. Shaking the woman’s hand up and down, he asked, “What’s your name?”
“Kristin Scott Thomas,” she replied.
He asked her to repeat herself, leaning in to hear her better. Leaning back, she put a hand to the side of her mouth and called out, “Kristin Scott Thomas.” And then she scurried away toward an elevator.
The timing of his visit to Manhattan was deliberate, and highly symbolic: after riding a wave of upstate anger over Albany and the economy to win the Republican primary last Tuesday, Mr. Paladino must now convince downstate voters to rally behind him.
It could prove a daunting challenge. Mr. Paladino, who is backed by the Tea Party, has espoused a deeply conservative agenda. He has proposed severe cuts to familiar programs like Medicaid, called for eliminating entire agencies and suggested using prisons as dormitories to teach welfare recipients hygiene.
But his aides believe that his plain-spoken message of tax cuts and smaller government will resonate as much on the Upper East Side as it does in Erie County, home to Buffalo.
And in an interview, Mr. Paladino vowed to spend most of his time in the New York City area until Election Day, wooing voters in places like Manhattan that he has previously described as filled with “smug, self-important, pampered liberal elitists.”
On Monday, as he crisscrossed the island to meet with reporters and donors, Mr. Paladino had more charitable things to say about the borough and its denizens — sort of.
Calling Manhattan a “fun place,” he insisted that he enjoyed staying here for “two or three days” at a time. “But then,” he added, “you got to go back and get your head adjusted.”
His Manhattan jaunt began early on Monday with an interview at the headquarters of Fox News, where he seemed awed by the hive of activity around him well before 8 a.m. “Why do you guys get up so early?” he asked a reporter.
Wherever he went, he insisted on opening doors himself and holding them open for those around him, especially women. (He has criticized his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, for imperiously waiting for aides to open doors for him. “He wouldn’t dirty himself and touch the handle,” Mr. Paladino said recently.)
For much of the day, Mr. Paladino — wearing his campaign uniform of gray suit and red tie — went unrecognized as he walked the streets and milled around office lobbies.
At one point, however, a gaggle of construction workers in Midtown asked to be photographed with him.
Mr. Paladino happily obliged, locking arms with the men and wishing them well.
In between meetings, he ticked off a list of his favorite Manhattan landmarks: the Flatiron Building; Elaine’s, the Upper East Side hangout; and Runyon’s, a bar on the East Side.
Still, Mr. Paladino sometimes found it hard to suppress complaints.
During a taxi ride, he tore into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, calling it corrupt and bloated.
His cabby, Shaheen Qanoongo, nodded in agreement. “You are absolutely right,” Mr. Qanoongo told Mr. Paladino, even while acknowledging to the candidate, “I don’t know much about you.”
Mr. Paladino apparently made a good impression: Mr. Qanoongo said he was open to voting for him. “It’s not like ‘I am a Democrat so I am going to vote for a corrupt Democrat,’ ” the driver explained.
Despite his reservations about life in Manhattan, Mr. Paladino at times seemed very much at home. He hailed a taxi like a native: stepping out confidently onto Avenue of the Americas and raising his right hand.
Off to the side, an aide grumbled about the difficulty of spotting a taxi’s “on-duty” light against the bright morning sun. If Mr. Paladino agreed, he kept it to himself.