Gustavo Rivera continues to wrack up endorsements for his bid to oust Senate Majority Leader Pedro Epsda Jr. with just 12 days remaining (including today) until the Sept. 14 primary.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said he has known the former aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and SEIU 1199 worker for seven years, adding: “I have always fought for victims whether its police brutality, immigration, or poverty. Gustavo has been there with me in this fight.”

“The community needs someone who has the heart of the people and is practical enough to fight in Albany,” Sharpton continued in a statement released by the Rivera campaign.

“Rivera has a balance of both and I intend to campaign with him. Pedro Espada can feed the people but he cannot deliver loaves back to the community. Gustavo Rivera can go and deliver and he has earned the respect in Albany. He has been in the trenches with me and I plan to campaign and fight in the trenches with him.”

Assemblyman Chuck Lavine, a Long Island Democrat, sent out a lengthy statement in support of Rivera, slamming Espada for his role in last summer’s Senate coup and subsequent 31-day stalemate and saying “every decent New Yorker was disgusted by that self-serving manipulation.”

Lavine then referenced Gov. David Paterson’s Yankees tickets scandal, (ouch, putting Epsada and the governor into the same sentence), saying:

“That exploitation caused an increase in public cynicism about government in general.
And this week’s scandal surrounding the governor has had the effect of rubbing salt into that wound, a wound that surely needs to be healed.”

And the Daily News also announced its support of Rivera, although the editorial is more a rejection of the majority leader than an endorsement of his challenger, who the paper praises for signing former NYC Mayor Ed Koch’s NY Uprising pledges and being free of the “ethical taint” of his opponent.

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