In Campaign for Governor, Paladino Pairs Fierce Talk With Spine-Cracking Hugs
The New York Times
To most New Yorkers, Carl P. Paladino is best known for his mouth, from which erupt the fiery language and provocative ideas and opinions that have characterized his campaign for governor of New York.
But to those who encounter Mr. Paladino in the flesh, he is quickly becoming famous for something else: his hug.
At a rally in Buffalo last week, Mr. Paladino, the Republican candidate, grappled with the broad shoulders of the former football star Thurman Thomas. At a luncheon in Boonville on Wednesday, Mr. Paladino ran into a middle-aged woman who had turned up to cheer him on. He enveloped her in a grateful embrace. “Wow, you’re a real hugger,” she said.
In an era of bodyguards and barricades, paparazzi and swine flu, the most affectionate candidates usually settle for a warm shoulder grasp. Mr. Paladino prefers the hug. Often, so do his supporters. “I’ve heard people say at events, ‘Wait, I didn’t get my hug from Carl,’ ” said Judy Pepenella, a leader of the Conservative Society for Action, based in Long Island.
Mr. Paladino’s embrace is a far cry from the society hug, bodies arched away below the collarbone, proper but cold. Nor does Mr. Paladino go for the “bro-hug” — that brief clasp, cheeks held at maximum remove, followed by a reassuringly manly smack on the back.
Rather, he specializes in a grandfatherly species of full-body bear hug, spine-cracking and uninhibited. Women are hugged. Men are hugged. Sometimes, reporters are hugged.
His signs read “I’m Mad as Hell Too, Carl!” Yet when Mr. Paladino — who has criticized gay-pride parades and vowed to take a baseball bat to Albany — wades into the crowd at senior centers or town halls, he is less Howard Beale, more Elmo. Often, he will not leave a room without hugging everyone. Resistance, where it exists, is futile: Mr. Paladino is so enthusiastic a hugger that huggees will occasionally find themselves lifted off the ground. (His opponent, Andrew M. Cuomo, is by observation a bro-hugger, though more often a two-handed handshaker.) Occasionally, Mr. Paladino throws in a kiss on the cheek, in the fashion familiar to anyone with an Italian-American uncle of a certain age.
Mr. Paladino and his campaign advisers jokingly refer to his hug as “the mind meld,” a kind of secret weapon, as if, when his ideas are garbled in verbal transmission, they can be passed on through physical contact.
“The vast majority of people in Buffalo know what it’s like to be hugged by Carl, even those who don’t want it,” said Michael R. Caputo, Mr. Paladino’s campaign manager. “We see it as a contrast to Andrew Cuomo, who is staying as far away from voters as possible.”
The weapon can be effective when deployed at close range. At a meeting in August with Hispanic ministers in the Bronx, Mr. Paladino at first faced a chilly reception but began to win the clergymen over with a speech on keeping teenagers off the streets. “When he got there, it was tense,” State Senator Rubén Díaz said. “But at the end, he had everybody. Everyone was hugging him and kissing him. He didn’t want to leave.”