Attorney general is the only candidate who has a chance of reforming Albany

In the end, there is no choice for governor but Andrew Cuomo, and it's not just because Carl Paladino burned his own campaign to cinders after scorching Rick Lazio in September's gubernatorial primary.

While it has become trendy to sneer at "career politicians," the fact is that a good one knows his stuff: how to work the levers of power to best advantage; who the players are; where the bodies are buried. Cuomo knows all that and he has laid out an approach for taking the state back from the special interests and the lawmakers they have bought.

Of the two major-party candidates, only Cuomo has a chance of bending the state toward rational decision-making. It won't be easy and Cuomo will have to guard against the old-boy network that helped to produce him, but he has the skills, the background and, if his campaign platform is to be believed, the desire and fortitude to reform an oppressive government that is willfully suffocating the state's economy.

Paladino, by contrast, only has his anger and his money going for him.