Nothing Personal, Paterson's Just a Bad Governor
New York's Democratic Governor David Paterson stated this week that the media is treating him unfairly because he is African-American, and that this is the reason for his low standing in the polls.
"I submit that the same kind of treatment that Deval Patrick is receiving right now in Massachusetts, and I’m receiving," Paterson told WWRL radio personality Errol Louis on August 21, "that we’re not in the post-racial period."
Paterson, New York's first African American governor, has been suffering near historic lows for the last several months. The August 16 Quinnipiac University poll gives him a 30 percent job approval rating. Fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo, the state's Attorney General, is favored over Paterson in next year's gubernatorial primary by a two-to-one margin, and Cuomo hasn't even committed to running.
To buy Paterson's assertion that this drubbing has come upon him primarily because he is a minority is to ignore the current economic and political picture in the Empire State. Unemployment is at close to 9 percent, having risen from 5.4 percent just a year earlier. The state has the second largest budget gap in the nation at $12 billion, and that gap accounts for close to 20 percent of its GDP. Paterson's scheme earlier this year to raise taxes on a variety of goods and services sparked outrage at the rise of the "Nanny State" and was quietly shuffled aside, either for later surreptitious passage or the legislative graveyard.
Paterson's inability to quell the State Senate shenanigans of this past summer may have been the last straw for New Yorkers. The opportunistic power grab of Pedro Espada, Jr. (D-Bronx), who switched to the Republicans and back to the Democrats with alternating promises of more powerful positions, reminded New Yorkers of just how self-interested and ineffectual their state government has become. Paterson's inability to negotiate the impasse or play the role of the levelheaded father figure to the boisterous Albany lot similarly cast him in a poor light.
There are many reasons why David Paterson is taking a beating in the press and in the polls, but the color of his skin is certainly not one of them. His resorting to that single point as an excuse for his current misfortunes demonstrates that his political slide has gone so far that he is now grasping at straws to keep from tumbling to the bottom.