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A bizarre mix of speculation and innuendo involving sex and drugs has had a surprising effect on New York Gov. David Paterson's reputation: It has made him a sympathetic figure for perhaps the first time in his troubled 22 months in office.
For more than a week, Paterson has been under intense pressure to respond to rumors about him that have played out not in the gossip of political insiders but on the front pages of the New York tabloids. The rumors concern what's in a supposedly forthcoming story in The New York Times that has taken on almost mythic dimensions before it has even run.
Tuesday afternoon, Paterson sought to seize control of a story that hasn't run, and allegations that no one except the Times knows is in it, reporting on his interview with a Times reporter before the Times could.
"I was interviewed for that piece. No such questions related to any of that information was asked of me at any interview," Paterson said in a press conference called immediately after the interview with Times Albany bureau chief Danny Hakim.
Paterson said he'd asked Hakim about the rumors. "He said he would leave all that speculation for other news sources," the governor said.
Paterson went on to excoriate the Times for failing to clear the air around the rumors and to cast himself -- believably -- as the victim of an out-of-control press.
"They don't seem to be interested in addressing it or doing anything about it -- I think it's appalling," Paterson said of the Times. The press, in floating the rumor, denied him "what I was owed as a human being," he said.
Paterson, elected lieutenant governor in 2006, became New York's first African American governor when Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign the governorship after a prostitution scandal. He began his new job with confessions of his own extramarital affairs, and things have gone downhill from there. His tenure has been marked by internal chaos, terrible political instincts and recently, questions around a gambling contract issued to a key local political figure.
Paterson has been struggling to keep his reelection bid viable despite a presumed challenge from the far better funded and more popular Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and suddenly even longtime critics are sympathetic.
"He's getting a raw deal. There are no specific allegations out there.
"There's only this speculation about what the Times report might contain," Brian Lehrer, the widely heard WNYC radio host, told POLITICO. "This will generate sympathy for him -- but probably not enough to save him from being defeated by Cuomo."
In his response Tuesday, Paterson was clearly trying to capitalize on the same skepticism of the press, and revulsion at its intrusion into private life, that helped revive Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign in February 2008, when the Times, after weeks of similar speculation, reported on McCain's relationship with a female lobbyist. That story was met with a storm of criticism.
"The only way I'm not going to be governor next year is at the ballot box, and the only way I'm leaving before that is in a box," Paterson said.
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