State Democratic Chairman Jay Jacobs latest hit on GOP gubernatorial nominee Rick Lazio is an attempt to link the former Long Island congressman to disgraced financier Bernie Madoff.

“I’ve just got one question for Mr. Lazio: Did Bernie Madoff tell you to gut the SEC or did you come up with that idea on your own?” Jacobs said in a press release.

As back-up, Jacobs cites the following passages from an April Village Voice opus by Wayne Barrett:

“In November 1997, the congressman’s Banking Committee perch earned him an invite for an hour-and-a-half tour of Bernie Madoff’s headquarters at 885 Third Avenue, just a few months after Peter Madoff sent a campaign check for $500.”

“The Madoffs were hardly known as political donors, but Lazio got four contributions, totaling $2,500, perhaps with promises of much more to come.”

“…Faced with strident opposition from the commission as well as the Office of Management and Budget, Lazio, in 1999, introduced a bill to cut the fees investors paid that covered virtually the entire $340 million annual cost of running the Securities Exchange Commission. The bill was just one example­ of the many tumbling out of the Vassar files of Lazio getting his best ideas when a lobbyist sent them to him.”

Jacobs also cites a 2000 article from Newsday and a 2002 transcript of an event at the Manhattan Institute to highlight Lazio’s history of “siding” with Wall Street and credit card companies while in the House and receit of campaign contributions from interests that wanted to deregulate the financial industry.

After he departed Congress, he went to work as a lobbyist for JPMorgan, landing a private sector job with an industry he had sought to protect while in office, Jacobs maintains.

It’s worth noting that while the state Democratic Party is acting as an attack dog on Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Cuomo’s behalf, the candidate himself is sticking to his day job.

Cuomo, who has done very little campaigning since announcing his candidacy on May 22 and landing the unanimous nomination of his party in Rye five days later, is in Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton today to announce an initiative to combat child pornography on the Internet.

…which is a feel-good issue that pretty much everyone can get behind – except child pornographers, I guess. But who wants their vote, anyway?

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