ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — That late July afternoon in 2008 television screens throughout New York snapped to the image of a stern Gov. David Paterson in an unprecedented statewide address.
"Our economic woes are so severe that I wanted
to talk to you personally this evening about where we stand," he said.
"Let me be honest: This situation will get worse before it gets better.
But the time to act is now ... today, I promise: there will be action."
Polls soon jumped for New York's first black
governor. The legally blind 54-year-old from Harlem who had been the most popular
member of the Legislature for 20 years was making the transition to chief
executive.
That promise ended in January 2010. By then, the
man who succeeded Eliot Spitzer after a prostitution scandal, had lost his
closest advisers to scandal and resignation. Public insults included a fellow
Democrat who called him a "coke-snorting, staff-banging governor." A
tabloid depicted him as a lying Pinnochio. A union boss compared him to the
German Army in World War II, and a rat, as Paterson addressed deficits by cutting
$40 billion to special interests over three years while threatening layoffs.
Editorials called for his resignation. Most in
Albany expected it. He faced months of unprecedented assault by rumors, none of
which would be proven. "Saturday Night Live" portrayed him as a
clueless, blind bungler.
He contributed to it all with many
self-contradictory statements, counterproductive baiting of the Legislature and
by turning the appointment of a U.S. senator into an "American
Idol"-style ordeal.
Under ethics investigations, Paterson finally ended
his election bid.
"I thought it was incredibly cruel,"
Paterson said of criticism and rumors. Within his family, who were also
targeted, it caused "total outrage."
"It clearly was orchestrated," he told
The Associated Press.
Paterson will be remembered as being governor
during a period when Albany looked like the Wild West. Infighting, corruption,
and a constant power struggle in the Senate caused gridlock, while Paterson
faced a string of scandals.
Yet Paterson produced one of his biggest wins in
the Senate's darkest days. He appointed a lieutenant governor, ignoring decades
of conventional legal wisdom, who could break the 31-31 tie in the Senate after
a coup. That ended the coup and restored some order.
Much of the stress was self-inflicted.
He blames the lack of a transition period before he
became governor, not letting Spitzer appointees leave sooner so he could create
his own team, and the difficulties of running a big state when you are legally
blind. His ability to memorize speeches thousands of words long with arcane
statistics on economics and legal precedents served him when he needed it once
a week or so as a senator. But as governor, the weekly load became daily.
"The combination of being unelected, being the
first African-American governor, and probably greater than both of the other
issues, being the first blind governor, added up to a frequent characterization
of a person who is not intelligent, is not serious and doesn't work hard,"
Paterson said.
"He was on his way to being a tragic
figure," said Lawrence Levy, executive dean of Hofstra University's
National Center on Suburban Studies and a longtime political commentator.
"He was someone who had risen beyond his disability to rise as high as he
did, but wasn't prepared for it by experience and certainly not by public
mandate.
"He refused to go away and slink out of
town," Levy said. "He made, in his last year, the best out of a bad
situation and will not be remembered as a clown, a parody, or an outright failure."
"Let me give him a grade of C-minus,"
said political scientist Doug Muzzio, a professor at Baruch College. "We
know the negatives.
"But the positive thing is I think his
handling of the budget extenders has given future governors a very powerful
instrument and perhaps that is his most positive legacy, and that's very
important," Muzzio said.
But Paterson started putting his own budget cuts
into traditional budget "extenders" of spending when the Legislature
and governor are late in agreeing to a new budget. That left the Legislature
with a Hobbesian choice of voting on Paterson's budget piecemeal, including
cuts to usually well-protected spending, or shutting down government and taking
the blame.
"This governor will be in the history books
for expanding the chief executive's authority, even if he didn't always use
power effectively himself," said Robert Ward, director of Fiscal Studies
at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. "Using emergency
budget bills to force the Legislature's hand may end the issue of extremely
late budgets — a pretty dramatic change."
Eighteen months after Paterson brought a bipartisan
crowd in the Assembly to its feet to cheer their new governor, he is out of a
job, without major prospects, abandoned by his own party and many friends.
"I don't think I changed as much as my
circumstances changed and I tried to address the hand I was dealt,"
Paterson. "I think that when you become that person, you learn and you
grow. ... Because when you take on that mantle of responsibility, you are
governing for all time."
Copyright
2010 The Associated Press.
(AP
Photo/Tim Roske)
