It was a secret project by operatives for the state’s Working Families Party.
Over the course of a month last spring, they assembled every day at the party’s office in Brooklyn to give a little-known law school professor named Zephyr Teachout a crash course in how to be a politician.
They showed her flash cards with photos of state legislators whose names she needed to learn. They hashed out what her campaign platform would be. They helped her to write and rehearse a stump speech.
The goal: To build a candidate who could challenge Gov. Cuomo from the left.
“The WFP took a pure academic and had a few weeks to give her an education in New York politics,” a Democratic operative said.
By the time party leaders gathered on May 31 for their convention, Teachout was ready to run. But after hours of tense negotiations, the party grudgingly gave Cuomo its nomination when he agreed to embrace a more liberal agenda.
Yet Teachout decided to run anyway — and has emerged as a sharp thorn in Cuomo’s side.
“There’s a new wave, a new kind of politician, that I am part of. That’s Elizabeth Warren, that’s Bill de Blasio,” she said in an interview, name-checking the crusading Massachusetts senator and the mayor.
“I’m part of this new populist progressive Democrat. But then, I also have the (anti) corruption background. I feel like I was built for this race.”
Teachout, who is opposing Cuomo in the Sept. 9 Democratic primary, has a microscopic chance of success.
She has corralled $181,000 in donations to Cuomo’s $35 million windfall. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 88% of registered voters haven’t heard enough to even form an opinion about her.
Still, Teachout, 42, has galvanized many in the party’s progressive wing, highlighting the lack of enthusiasm, even distaste, for Cuomo among some liberals because he’s embraced tax cuts and charter schools.
Left-leaning publications like The Nation and The Village Voice have written glowingly of her candidacy, and she even scored an endorsement from the Public Employees Federation, the state’s second-largest public employees union.
Cuomo’s unsuccessful attempt to knock her off the ballot — on the grounds she didn’t establish residency in New York — has reinforced her David vs. Goliath candidacy.
“Andrew Cuomo has done everything he can to get rid of a real debate and a real Democratic primary,” Teachout said at a sparsely attended press conference in Brooklyn last week.
In an interview later in the day, she resumed the line of attack.
“When he tries to kick me out, my feeling is, what is this old boys club afraid of?” she said.
The seeds of Teachout’s campaign were planted in February, when a Working Families Party operative contacted her on G-chat.
As an assistant professor at Fordham University’s School of Law, she had become known for her work studying public corruption. (Her book, “Corruption in America,” will be published next month by Harvard University Press.)
But except for her role as head of online organizing for Democrat Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Teachout’s political résumé was thin.
“I’m a deeply political person,” she said. Running for office one day was a matter of “when, not whether,” she added.
Teachout cites schools, jobs, immigration reform and the gas-drilling technique known as fracking as major issues, but “the root issue here is corruption, because of the way it impacts all of these things.”
And she has made Cuomo’s Moreland Commission scandal a cornerstone of her campaign, calling on him to resign if he knew top aides were obstructing an investigation by his anti-corruption panel.
On Friday, she announced a “Whistleblower Bus Tour” to expose the cost of corruption in New York.
Teachout was born in rural Vermont, one of five children. Her mother was a state court judge; her father was a law professor.
“People are surprised to find out my parents aren’t hippies,” she said of her unusual name. “The last name is Dutch, and the first name is just a name.”
She graduated from Yale and then Duke University’s School of Law, and co-founded a program in North Carolina to train lawyers in death penalty cases.
“I represented people on Death Row,” she said. “I will always fight for people without a voice.”
Teachout is single and lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She runs marathons, spends summers acting in a Vermont community theater group, and takes part in a regular poker game whose players include actor Chris Eigeman.
Many see her as a protest candidate, rather than as a viable contender.
“This is supposed to be a liberal state,” said writer James Ledbetter, who co-hosted a fund-raiser for Teachout. “A lot of people think it looks like what it would look like if it were run by Republicans.”
Indeed, analysts say a platform that focuses on cleaning up government rarely resonates with voters.
” ‘Good government’ has never gotten anyone into office as a campaign theme,” said David Birdsell, dean of the Baruch College School of Public Affairs.
Even her old boss Howard Dean has declined to back her.
“He’s decided to sit it out,” she said, curtly. “When I mentioned that Andrew Cuomo had tried to sue me to get me off the ballot, he said, ‘Well, you know that’s great for your campaign.'”
And the party that encouraged her to run is now backing her opponent.
“I am running to win,” Teachout insisted. “I know I will do a better job than Andrew Cuomo, which is the most straightforward reason to run.”
Asked if she might consider seeking office again, a question that implied she will fall short, Teachout responded like a real politician would. Her candidate school teachers would have been proud.
Her next race, she said, will be “my reelection campaign.”
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