Teachout a hit among fracking opponents
Law professor Zephyr Teachout's campaign for governor survived a court challenge yesterday. That clears the way for Teachout's own challenge: to...

Aug 12, 2014 — Law professor Zephyr Teachout's campaign for governor survived a court challenge yesterday. That clears the way for Teachout's own challenge: to Gov. Andrew Cuomo in next month's Democratic primary.
A New York judge dismissed a suit brought by Cuomo supporters who argued that Teachout didn't meet the state's 5-year residency requirement to run.
The Fordham University professor spent last weekend rallying liberal voters against the governor. At a rally in Cooperstown where she said, if elected, she'd ban hydrofracking her first day in office.
About 75 mostly retirees waited on wooden courtroom pews as Zephyr Teachout climbed the stairs into the Otsego County Courthouse Friday.
The green group Sustainable Otsego organized the meeting. Its moderator, Adrian Kuzminski introduced Teachout, listing her Ivy League education and experience fighting big money in politics.
Teachout opened her remarks saying "I just drove through the most beautiful country in the world, we better ban fracking right away."
Clad in a beige skirt suit, Teachout tried to leave the microphones at the podium, but returned when audience members couldn’t hear her. At the bare bones meeting, there were no campaign posters. No streamers. No carefully edited speech. She arrived with just one assistant.
But for thirty minutes Teachout slammed Governor Cuomo for having abandoned the liberal agenda. And roused the crowd with her plan to rein in corporate monopolies, build up public transit and invest in clean energy. “Solar farms are jobs," Teachout said. "Off-shore wind is jobs, not just for the folks down there but for the manufacturing up here. Building in hydro is jobs and what’s best about it is it’s jobs and building a kind of power that we ourselves can take control of.”
The crowd got to their feet to give Teachout a standing ovation as she wrapped up her speech.
Andy Minnig, a member of the Otsego County Democratic Committee, says he was fired up by Teachout’s speech. He thinks her policies make her the true successor to Mario Cuomo, the current governor’s father, saying “I have to go home now and convince the other members of my family to abandon the myth that Andrew has lived on. That is the wonderful moral presence of his father; Andrew simply does not have that.”
But not all upstate residents are as taken with her stances. Teachout has adopted a hard stance on hydrofracking and is trying to draw votes from a region that’s split on the issue. According to a recent poll from Siena College, 60 percent of Southern Tier residents think fracking would be an economic boon to the area. Despite that, half of voters in the Southern Tier say, they’re still against fracking.
Either way, Teachout says she would offer all Southern Tier residents a change of style. “Look, I think what people really want is a governor who’s honest, tell people where she stands, engage," she said. "And if you disagree, you disagree. But whatever your party affiliation, there’s been a failure of leadership.”
Many attendees stuck around after the meeting. Over a dozen queued up near the podium to talk with the gubernatorial hopeful, including Danielle Boudet who said, “I love her. I’ve been following her for the past few weeks since she announced her run for governor. We are from a local organization, Oneonta Area for Public Education, and we feel that Zephyr will be an ally to us where Governor Cuomo has not listened to any of our concerns.”
Teachout stayed to mingle with residents, answered questions and listened to concerns until event staff kicked everyone out of the courtroom. She answered each question thoughtfully, letting people know if she hadn’t fully considered a given issue.
There are four weeks of campaigning before the Democratic primary September 9.
Monica Sandreczki reports for WSKG, Binghamton
