Monday, January 03, 2011
David Paterson goes out the way he came in: saying the right things and doing the right things. He couldn't have known what he was wandering into: what he thought he was getting was a seat in the US Senate, and by the way, if Elliot Spitzer had that in mind at the time, doesn't that speak rather well of Spitzer? What Paterson ended up with, of course, was a very different thing. His personal life was turned inside out, and he inherited a mess that went far beyond the mere dysfunction in the legislature that Spitzer had brought him in to help mediate. Paterson handled it all the way I think it should be handled, by forthrightly acknowledging the situation, whether it was his own checkered past, or the profoundly broken structure of state government. His reward for this was mockery, and when he had the audacity to appoint someone to the Senate seat that he'd wanted for himself that was not the person that the political press had decreed as the proper heir, notwithstanding the fact that Kristen Gillibrand has been a pretty good Senator from New York, his career was over. Poor son of a bitch, I wish him well.
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