statements stretched to 25 minutes as the two—intense but seemingly not angry—alternated ripostes and kept their own informal time limits. At one point, Mr. Cuomo gestured to the four panelists and said, 'Maybe we should let them play.'" High national and state unemployment hurt Lehrman's campaign. "The general election campaign for governor was billed as a 'referendum on Reaganomics." However, if the election had been a referendum on Reaganomics and unemployment, Cuomo would have won by a margin reflecting his party's enormous voter-registration edge and allowing room for a few disgruntled Republicans and Independents as well, according to a Princeton University thesis on the gubernatorial campaign. "Instead, Lew Lehrman was able to use technologies such as television and direct mail to campaign 'offensively' on issues which were more favorable for him such as the death penalty, crime, welfare fraud, prayer in schools, and unpopular record of the [Hugh] Carey Administration. Moreover, he was able to blunt the Reaganomics issue by widely publicizing an economic plan of his own." Lehrman himself was critical of the national Republican strategy in the election at a time when U.S. unemployment was over 10 percent: "I believe the Reagan Administration should be making a major effort to show clearly how we are going to rebuild the economy and create 20 million jobs in the next 10 years," he told the New York Times. He added: "A slogan like 'Stay the Course' is inadequate." At the time, the size of Lehrman's commercial advertising was virtually unprecedented. The Christian Science Monitor reported late in the campaign: "The ads have aired so frequently that the New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon showing a parrot next to a television set. The parrot says, 'I'm Lew Lehrman. Lew Lehrman for governor!...' The barrage of television ads have effectively turned Lewis Lehrman into a household term. In his Borough Park, Brooklyn, campaign swing here recently, one youngster shouted, 'There's the man on TV!'" Cuomo sought to make Lehrman's spending a campaign issue. Lehrman "was a clean slate upon which any image could be drawn through television and radio ads," wrote Cuomo in the Diaries of Mario M. Cuomo. "The polls indicated that neither the gold standard nor Reaganomics would enhance the image—the public knew little of the former and New York State was suffering severely from the Reagan Recession and budget cuts—so these issues were ignored. Instead, television ads—four or five