The best day of Zephyr Teachout’s campaign for governor was spent in a courtroom.

While running against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Cuomo sued her over allegations that she wasn’t a New York State resident.  The court proceedings put Teachout in the spotlight and spending two days in Brooklyn talking about her life gave her “the most attention,” she said.

Teachout, a Fordham University law professor, talked about her primary campaign and her book “Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United” in front of a packed crowd on Friday afternoon in Maxwell Auditorium.

Despite losing to Cuomo, Teachout garnered 33 percent of the vote and got a few laughs from the crowd by taking early jabs at her former opponent.

“We can stretch a nickel farther than anybody,” she joked, as she referenced her book’s sale record against Cuomo’s. Teachout got a $1,000 advance on her book compared to Cuomo’s $700,000.

Teachout quickly got into the lecture and gave the crowd a lesson on the history of corruption in American politics. Her main focus of corruption was based in the courts.

“If I were to write a book about corruption outside of the courts, I would not have the time to run for public office,” she said.

Seth Quam, a sophomore broadcast and digital journalism and citizenship and civic engagement major, said that “corruption in politics and big business is a big issue” and if “we as a society want to make change in other ways, the issue of corruption is standing as an obstacle to those changes.”

Teachout’s main focus was the Citizens United ruling, which ruled that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political spending by a nonprofit organization, and what that has meant for campaign finance.

Teachout affirmed the point that “in the 1980s, lawmakers would spend 15 hours a year fundraising…today lawmakers spend at least 15 hours a week fundraising.” She later called for public campaign funding as opposed to the status quo of private campaign funding.

Teachout then moved to her second point, calling for the “break up” of big companies and banks. She blames the anti-trust guidelines that President Ronald Reagan put into place in 1981, and referenced the rewriting of them as one of the solutions to the problem. She called for the return to the President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and President Theodore Roosevelt time of anti-monopoly.

“We used to break up companies if they controlled over 5 percent of the marketplace,” she said.

Teachout then moved to questions from the audience, which once again started with her discussing Cuomo. When asked about what surprised her the most during her campaign, she responded by saying, “the number of mistakes Andrew Cuomo made.” The response sent the crowd into an uproar of laughter.

Julia Arsenault, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she thought that “she (Teachout) was a really great speaker, a lot of her topics were really relevant to a lot of what’s going on in campus.”

Teachout also received a couple questions asking her about the sit-in organized by THE General Body in Crouse-Hinds Hall. She replied that she did not have enough information or knowledge on the subject, but she reminded listeners to always question their representative on “where they get their information from.”

The lecture concluded with the moderator asking Teachout if we would see her on the campaign trail again, which she replied “I sure hope so.”

When asked whether or not she would like to see Teachout run, Cierra Britton, a freshman political science major, said, “absolutely, she has great stands…seems like a great candidate.”

Published on November 14, 2014 at 9:14 pm

Contact Michael: mjriccar@syr.edu