Reisman: Hawkins says Andy, Rob are both just GOP

Howie Hawkins of the Green Party is the other guy in the 2014 gubernatorial race.

The press invariably calls him "earnest," which shades toward condescension when you think about it.

Hawkins, who is from Syracuse, has been running for office on the Green Party line since 1993. That year, he ran for city council and got three percent of the vote. He's run unsuccessfully for council six or seven other times, including 2011 when he got 48 percent.

He's also run for Onondaga county executive. Four times he's been a candidate for Congress.

Hawkins ran for the Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2006. He's run for state comptroller twice — first in 1998 when the Green Party's gubernatorial candidate was "Grampa" Al Lewis, the actor who starred in "The Munsters."

In 2010, he was lost in a sea of gubernatorial candidates, a collection that included Kristin Davis, also known as the "Manhattan Madam," and the eccentric Jimmy McMillan whose mantra, "the rent is too damn high," became a catch phrase on the late night circuit.

Still, Hawkins garnered 1.3 percent of the vote, enough to ensure that the Green Party had a ballot line this time around. A recent Quinnipiac University poll had him at 9 percent, compared to 51 percent for the Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo and 31 percent for Republican Rob Astorino.

Nine percent may seem modest, but it is a rarefied height for the Greens.

"It's been saw toothin' up," said Hawkins, who tends to drop his g's when speaking.

His rising profile makes him a thorn in Cuomo's side. Hawkins has tapped into the psyches of disaffected Democrats, who don't like Cuomo's centrist tendencies on everything from Common Core to fracking.

"Plus his style," Hawkins said of Cuomo. "Cuomo's arm twisting, they don't like it. I think I'm going to get a lot of protest votes from those quarters."

His platform is an updated blend of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, packaged into what his party calls "The Green New Deal." This includes a $15 minimum wage and squeezing more money ($30 billion annually) from the richest New Yorkers by restoring the progressive income-tax brackets of the 1970s.

Similar to Zephyr Teachout, who challenged Cuomo from the party's left in a September primary, Hawkins has no chance at winning, but he does threaten to upset the governor's quest to win in a landslide on the order of, say, 65 percent.

Whether the threat holds up remains to be seen. As far as Hawkins is concerned, it doesn't matter who he helps or hinders. In his populist view, Astorino and Cuomo are different brands of Republican, both bought and paid for by the one percent.

"The rich Republicans are backin' Cuomo with their money, that's the establishment in New York," he said. "Astorino's gettin' the grassroots Republicans, and they have a party structure, particularly upstate. We've got to speak for ourselves, organize and act for ourselves and try to persuade the majority that we got a better way forward."

In his memoir, Cuomo dismisses the far left in New York as "an extreme movement … capable of incendiary, divisive rhetoric designed to mobilize people and garner attention."

There may be more than a little truth in that, but it hardly describes Hawkins, a Marine veteran who is semi-retired and earns $23,000 a year as a UPS employee. He comes across as soft-spoken, unassuming and, well, OK —earnest.

Incendiary, he's not. But he has garnered attention, much more than he received in the 2010 gubernatorial race.

Hawkins has gotten interviews with the three major New York City newspapers. And he's gotten support from some of the city's influential Democratic clubs.

He's done this with nickels and dimes. When I talked to him in White Plains last week, he figured he had about $35,000 tops in his campaign war chest. A TV commercial is supposedly in the works — his only one.

When I talked to him in White Plains last week, he was on his way to a meeting with students at SUNY Purchase where he preached to the choir about a proposal for free college education and forgiving student debt.

Hawkins is driving all over the state in a Hyundai with 90,000 on the odometer.

"I hope it gets me through the election," he said. "I've lost the majority of my cars hittin' deer," he said.

He told a story about totaling a car in 2006 when he ran against Hillary Clinton.

"I was in New Paltz, finished there at midnight. I had to be at Ithaca at noon the next day, but I had time to drive home to Syracuse. Route 17. Deer popped up. Bang. Totaled the car. Killed the deer."

Hawkins was stranded in the middle of nowhere. He waited in the dark until 6 a.m. when a cop finally showed up.

"The tow guy was about three miles the next exit down, but I didn't know," he recalled. "So I missed Ithaca. I was exhausted."

Reach Phil Reisman at preisman@lohud.com Twitter: @philreisman.