SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Larry Sharpe wants to legalize weed, eliminate the state income tax and sever ties with the U.S. Department of Education.
Those aggressive changes are just part of Sharpe’s Libertarian platform as he runs for governor of New York.
In a recent interview with The Post-Standard/syracuse.com Sharpe said his goal is to upend the political establishment with bold ideas that will generate revenue for the state and deregulate things like business and education.
Before any of that can happen, though, Sharpe would need to win a race in which most people don’t even know he’s running. He’s among the least known of six candidates vying for the governor’s job, and he’s got less money and institutional support than most of his challengers.
To fix that, he’s been crisscrossing the state meeting with voters to get his name and his ideas into the public eye.
As governor, Sharpe said his top goal would be eliminating the state income tax. He would abolish all economic development corporations like the ones Gov. Andrew Cuomo created to funnel money into projects upstate. He would end the state’s policy of requiring counties to pay for services like Medicaid. He would legalize marijuana, which he said would attract people and business here.
He would also lease naming rights on state infrastructure to bring in money. If taxpayers built it, he said, let’s get a private company to slap their name on it…for a price.
His prime example is the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, formerly the Tappan Zee Bridge. Why not charge a company millions of dollars to sponsor it?
“We have an imperial bridge named after our royal family,” he said. “It could be the Staples Bridge, the 3M Bridge, the Kellogg Bridge, the Apple Bridge, whatever. These companies spend billions of dollars every year on marketing. $100 million for a bridge? Why not?”
He’d do the same with other state-owned infrastructure, from roads to bridges to locks on the Erie Canal. He suggested making Google pay to repair or replace Interstate 81 in Syracuse.
Sharpe also doesn’t want New York to be beholden to federal education regulations. He said centralized control doesn’t work. He would refuse federal money for education and let New York write its own policies, including letting students opt out of standardized testing and only requiring schooling from kindergarten to 10th grade. He’d also abolish the Board of Regents.
“Some schools are going to fail. That’s true. Those I will help,” he said. “Now, though, we’re failing en masse. Have you seen our graduation rates? They’re embarrassing.”
Sharpe, 50, is a businessman from Queens with a strong accent. He’s a Marine Corps veteran and has a wife and two daughters. In 2016, he sought his party’s nomination for vice president, eventually losing to Bill Weld, governor of Massachusetts.
Sharpe readily acknowledges he has an uphill battle in New York. Apart from his lack of big money and name recognition, he’s running with a party often dismissed as a sideshow. But he said he has positive momentum heading into the election.
In 2016, Libertarian Gary Johnson (running with Weld) received a record number of votes for his party in the presidential race, prompting newfound attention for the limited-government movement.
Johnson won 2.3 percent of the vote in New York — more than 176,000 votes. He received 4.5 million votes nationwide running against two historically unpopular major party candidates: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Many voters turned to him out of frustration with the other options.
Sharpe has raised a quarter-million dollars so far in the race. That’s more than any prior Libertarian candidate, but still pales in comparison to Gov. Cuomo’s $16 million war chest. Most of Sharpe’s donations come from out of state.
Sharpe is running an active campaign, but said he has a hard time generating interest at events. Some towns he goes to, only a handful of people show up to hear him speak. Late last month, he held the first rally of his campaign at Thornden Park in Syracuse.
Another challenge, Sharpe said, is attracting attention from media. High-profile candidates like Cuomo and his recently defeated primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon, tend to sap up a lot of airtime.
“Nixon is very exciting, she’s popular in New York City. Cuomo is the governor. So they tend to get more media than I do,” Sharpe said. “When I first started running people were picking me up because they though, Ah, Libertarian, he’ll be funny. He’ll say something stupid.”
Sharpe’s presence on the ballot will likely be enough to earn ballot access for his party for the next four years. If he gets 50,000 votes as a Libertarian, the party gets a permanent line on ballots until the next gubernatorial race.
Sharpe said that’s not why he’s in this race, though. He’s in it because there is a disdain for the establishment. If elected, he said, he would probably spend four years at war (and in court) with the federal government.
“This state is in the spiral of decay because of the establishment,” he said. “How are they going to change the system? It’s like asking someone to burn their own house down.”
Credit: syracuse.com
