Seeking a reset of his faltering campaign for governor, Carl P. Paladino bought a three-minute advertisement on local television stations in Buffalo on Thursday to try to persuade New Yorkers that he is a serious candidate for governor, despite recent flare-ups and angry outbursts.

Looking composed, Mr. Paladino offered no apologies, not even for an altercation with a New York Post reporter that catapulted him to national prominence while sowing fears among fellow Republicans about his temperament.

Instead, Mr. Paladino, a Buffalo businessman, tried to refocus the conversation on the severity of the state’s problems and his belief that traditional politicians cannot be trusted to solve them.

“Our state is in a death spiral,” Mr. Paladino said in the advertisement, filmed near his office in Buffalo. “We pay the highest taxes in the country. Spending and debt are widely out of control, and many in our Legislature are crooks. Our state is hemorrhaging jobs; our young people move as soon as they graduate. Upstate and downstate are dying.”

The advertisement followed a tumultuous week for Mr. Paladino, who faced criticism for injecting personal attacks into the race, including an off-the-cuff suggestion that his Democratic opponent, Andrew M. Cuomo, had engaged in extramarital affairs. He was also criticized for suggesting on Tuesday that the powerful State Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, was a criminal.

Even Roger J. Stone Jr., an informal adviser to Mr. Paladino and a longtime Republican consultant, publicly criticized Mr. Paladino’s strategy this week and urged a new direction – remarks that dismayed Mr. Paladino, an aide said.

On Tuesday night, after hearing from friends and conservative leaders that he needed to take drastic measures to save his candidacy, Mr. Paladino set aside money to buy TV time. And shortly after midnight, Mr. Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael R. Caputo, wrote on his Twitter page that Mr. Paladino had canceled all media appearances for the day.

Aides said Mr. Paladino spent most of Wednesday in seclusion in his Buffalo home taking counsel from Republican officials and pondering what he would say.

“Tonight, Carl addressed the substantive topics and solutions New Yorkers crave,” said Edward F. Cox, the chairman of the state Republican Party. “They are the same issues he has been highlighting for months. They are the same issues Andrew Cuomo refuses to address.”

Mr. Paladino finalized his script hours before the advertisement was shown at 5:13 p.m., according to one Republican official. Advertisements on upstate radio stations billed Mr. Paladino’s appearance as “Carl Talks Directly to New Yorkers,” and aides said they were seeking a statewide audience.

Looking less fatigued than he has in recent days, Mr. Paladino opened by explaining why he was angered last week at the reporter who questioned him aggressively about Mr. Paladino’s suggestions that the press dig into Mr. Cuomo’s marriage to his former wife, Kerry Kennedy.

Mr. Paladino said that he had been barraged with questions about his own marriage, about his affair with a former employee, and about his daughter, and that he was merely arguing that Mr. Cuomo ought to face the same questions. He said that unlike many politicians, he had acknowledged his daughter and admitted the affair, but that his honesty did not satisfy the press and only incited them to demand more detail, like when the girl, now 10, had been conceived.

“What I meant to express in my anger is simply this: Does the media ask Andrew such questions?” Mr. Paladino said. “Andrew’s prowess is legendary.”

But in keeping with advice that he reorient his campaign along substantive issues, Mr. Paladino used most of the three minutes to describe his plans for fixing Albany and creating jobs, including cutting taxes by 10 percent, appointing a special prosecutor to investigate political corruption and pursuing new oil and gas drilling in upstate New York.

“We can turn Albany upside down,” Mr. Paladino said. “We can take out the trash and bring economic growth, jobs and prosperity back to New York.”

Aides said the campaign was finalizing position papers and planned to release a new one every few days in the weeks ahead.

Still, the day’s events carried a whiff of the campaign theater that Mr. Stone and Mr. Caputo favor. Mr. Caputo said Thursday that the candidate had set aside more than $100,000 for the commercials, a relatively modest sum given the costs of advertising in New York’s high-priced media markets.

And it was unclear on Thursday just how many New Yorkers would actually see the advertisement, which was broadcast on just three stations, all network affiliates in Buffalo.

Mr. Caputo said Thursday evening that stations in other cities around the state had told the campaign that they could not accommodate such a last-minute change of their scheduling.

In a statement, Josh Vlasto, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said Mr. Paladino “can’t con New Yorkers.”

“They have seen the real Carl, and they know he is unfit to be governor with his unstable outbursts, smears and total lack of substance,” Mr. Vlasto added. “New Yorkers don’t need his dysfunctional personality in Albany – Albany is dysfunctional enough.”

In his commercial, Mr. Paladino accused Mr. Cuomo of ducking Mr. Paladino’s calls for a debate. That challenge was pre-empted, however, by an announcement from Mr. Cuomo’s campaign, sent just before Mr. Paladino’s commercial was shown, that the Democrat had accepted an invitation to debate Mr. Paladino and five other candidates.

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(Source: NY Times)