There was going to be a reason to end eventually anyway. This one just got him there sooner.

But for a brief, two- or three-day period, David Paterson and the people left in his increasingly small circle gave it a shot. A popular attorney general had waited too long to campaign hard in Massachusetts and lost by 5 percent. A down-in-the-polls governor had clawed his way back to credibility and then a double-digit lead against the establishment darling in Texas. Maybe there was some crazy way to turn a high-teens approval rating and a 25-year record in Albany into a winning outsider campaign.

On the Friday afternoon before David Paterson launched his campaign, it seemed so simple—to Rep. Charlie Rangel, at least, who seemed offended by questions about whether the governor should run, offended by the New York Times, the rumor mill and just about everything else. He was supporting Paterson, plain and simple. The answer to why was plain and simple too.

“I can tell you very easily: if you think about it, there is no other candidate than the incumbent governor. Period. Period,” Rangel said. “There’s nothing to add on ‘What if?’ There’s no ‘What if.’ I support the governor—it’s almost as bad as asking whether I support Obama, or whether I support Bloomberg.”

Rangel rejected the idea that he should be able to cite specific policies or decisions in explaining his position.

“You don’t really have to justify your support for the governor when there’s nobody prepared to say that they can do better,” he said.

And that ended the conversation.

Already, though, that was not proving enough for the rest of New York, full of people like the cab driver who spent his Saturday morning ferrying people back and forth to the Hofstra campus from the train station, refusing to accept that there was any reason to support the governor. An African immigrant who said he had lost his job as a Wall Street trader five months earlier, the cab driver accepted the idea that part of New York’s problem was the recession.

“But what Paterson is doing,” he said, after rattling off complaints about property taxes, foreclosure rates and withheld school payments, “he’s affecting more people than the economy.”

He looped around another corner in Hempstead, pulling close to the campus.

“If he likes the Democratic Party,” the driver concluded, “he should not run. I would vote for anyone running against him.”

Before Paterson was turning his future over to the man he had only days before been mocking and vowing to beat—before he was standing chin-down at a lonely podium refusing to give clear answers on whether he would resign or run or if he had called David Johnson’s ex-girlfriend, before he finally, sullenly, told the world he was indeed going to “step back”—Paterson really had been preparing to make a case. A small circle of aides and advisors believed, were convinced, that he could win and that he should win. He was going to change the narrative, run as if he were not the governor, undertake a campaign as if this had been his first statewide run—because, basically, it was.

After all, there was not much to being Eliot Spitzer’s running mate—so little, in fact, that Paterson started complaining halfway through the campaign that he did not have enough to do. Other than playing the homegrown host to Spitzer’s primary night party at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Harlem and filling out the other side of the campaign bumper stickers, he was almost a phantom presence in the 2006 race. This year was going to be about telling his story, introducing himself to voters, crafting a narrative that would tick his poll numbers up point by point and tear every bit of conventional wisdom to shreds.  

It was supposed to have restarted this way: his wife pumping their fists in the air as they took to the stage in the same Hofstra multipurpose room used as spin alley for the last 2008 presidential debate, Paterson was going to step right into the impossible fight. The governor had more than the cab driver to convince: Hempstead Mayor Wayne Hall said afterward that he was there more out of loyalty to his relationship with Paterson than any specific accomplishment he could name, and even state Democratic chair Jay Jacobs stopped short of agreeing that the governor was right to claim more accomplishments in two years than most governors have after two terms.

Song choice for Paterson’s entrance: “I’ll Take You There.”

And he tried to take the crowd there in a stump speech that began with the tales of imaginary New Yorkers facing very real troubles, from the unemployed sheet metal worker to the older gay couple unable to get married.

“They have not been knocked down,” went the line, “and they never will be.”

Here he was, he said, a man from among their downtrodden ranks, leading them to higher ground. Extending health care benefits, strengthening DWI penalties, pension reform, public authorities reform, Rockefeller drug law reform—real accomplishments he rattled through, definitive, us-vs.-them populist gold.  

“That’s not a rumor, that’s the truth,” he said, using it to launch into a blaze against all the politicians, the pundits, the pollsters, the insiders, the special interests and all the others he wanted to cast as the cunning players looking to stick their knives into his back and the backs of all New Yorkers.

Afterward, Jacobs figured that the focus would go only to Paterson’s hedged attack against the unnamed ambitious people who might want to run against him.

---

“I enjoy being governor. I want to make the decisions.

I want the ball. I think I should be leading the state for

the next four years. And I have felt that way all along,”

Paterson said, after finishing his campaign swing.

---

“I’m pretty interested to see how his words are reported today. If the spin-making in the news is all about the one line of who is he referring to when he said ‘other candidates,’ then it’s going to be very tough to get that message out,” Jacobs said, running spin for the campaign as the governor stood in the hallway. “But if the message is about what he’s accomplished, that’s going to be different.”

What made up most of the coverage were reports of a “sad gov,” (Post) addressing “dozens of supporters,” (Buffalo NBC affiliate) in a “dimly lit” (New York magazine) “sparsely decorated” (Times website) room as he talked about overcoming his own handicaps and hardship. There was not much talk of policy or the standing room-only crowd that had eventually prompted a fire marshal to shut down the doors and keep 50-plus people in the hall.

Paterson campaign aides were furious, apoplectic. The story they wanted to tell, the story that they had seen in front of them, was just not getting through. They had stacked their 12-page “Know the Facts” booklet of all of Paterson’s accomplishments on the table, complete with a photo of the governor on the phone in an Oval Office-reminiscent scene. Few people took it. Fewer people read a line of it.

At the time, this seemed like their biggest problem.





Richie Fife is a Ray Romano type with Q-Tip white hair. He has some experience dismantling campaigns: before being hired to be Paterson’s campaign manager around Labor Day last year, he spent the summer working with Rep. Carolyn Maloney on ways to hammer Kirsten Gillibrand, the woman Paterson had appointed to the Senate at the end of a months-long process that cemented the popular image of the governor as an indecisive man, in over his head, teetering on the edge of disaster.

But before that, Fife was one of the top aides to Carl McCall in his 2002 gubernatorial campaign, which successfully transformed Andrew Cuomo’s early-year lead into a teary defeated withdrawal a week before the primary. Before that, in his very first professional race, under the wing of David Garth, Fife was a young aide to the 1978 re-election campaign of Gov. Hugh Carey, who himself was behind in the polls, mired in unsolvable state economy and facing a challenge from within his own party—in fact, from his own lieutenant governor, Mary Anne Krupsak.

Slogan: “The more you know the facts, the more you’ll know Hugh Carey is right… for governor.”

Even after the kick-off, Fife refused to name how many other employees there were on the Paterson campaign, based at the bottom of the spiral staircase in state Democratic Party headquarters on Park Avenue South. The real power, anyway, was in the campaign kitchen cabinet: Harold Ickes advising from Washington, Al Quinlan running the polls, Mark Putnam crafting the television ads that had hit the air unusually early last fall, and Bill Lynch consulting along with the president of his firm, Luther Smith. And then the unofficial advisors: Paterson’s father, his current chief of staff Larry Schwartz, his former chief of staff Charles O’Byrne and, generally only speaking directly to Paterson, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

From his office, which featured dry-erase board with “important dates” running from the state convention in May through the general election in November on one side and a breakdown of Democratic primary demographics on the other, Fife coordinated the plan: Take Paterson home to Hempstead, show his humanity, personal struggle. Then slowly take him out on the road, let him connect with slices of primary voters that they could keep safe from Cuomo and possibly build into a presence of volunteers and house party hosts who could be the bit-by-bit beachhead.

Paterson had been road-testing the rhetoric that would have been for weeks. At the end of January, in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, when he was administering the oath of office to re-elected City Council Member Sara Gonzalez, he added, “and that I will never forget where I came from” to the end. In Chinatown two days before the campaign kick-off, he rang in the Chinese New Year by thundering, “the Tiger exudes strength—and I’m going to need a few tigers in Albany to try to get some of our problems straightened out.”

After Hempstead, Paterson flew north to drop the first puck at an outdoor hockey game between the Syracuse Crunch and Binghamton Senators. He was booed. In Rochester, in the basement of the Laborers Local 435 union hall, he was cheered. Six hours after the first crack at his stump speech, his voice was more gravely and resonant, the progression through his points more conversational and calm. He adlibbed. He joked. He brandished the executive credentials of appointing Richard Ravitch lieutenant governor, the action he took to save the budget, vetoing the ethics bill. He claimed two on-time budgets, despite the fact that he had not actually been on time with either.

Whistles, cheers, applause. Afterward, Paterson talked and posed for photographs with just about everyone in the room. Except for two Marcellus Shale protestors—whose concerns he listened to intently for five minutes, behind a perimeter of state troopers so as not to be disturbed—they were all fans. Fife showed off the 240 people on the sign-in sheets to reporters—more by one or two hundred than McCall had ever drawn to a Rochester event that he had seen.





By the time the governor arrived at Christe’s, the West Seneca strip mall diner about 15 minutes outside of Buffalo, things were looking somewhat up for the Paterson people. What was supposed to be a 30-person meet-and-greet has already attracted a crowd of 50 half an hour before the governor arrived, and 200 by the time he entered to enough applause to encourage him into a victory lap of handshakes with diners in Christe’s front room.

He added a few more elected officials in West Seneca, getting introduced first by local Town Supervisor Wally Piotrowski and then by Assembly Member Crystal Peoples-Stokes to a crowd of other officials, activists and their children, and contingents from the local chapters of the Teamsters, Laborers and Boilermakers.

The third iteration of the stump speech was the most casual. Though he wandered off occasionally along the way, he hit all the lines and major points. He joked. He slammed Sarah Palin. He picked up the University of Buffalo 20/20 plan proposed in Spitzer’s first State of the State address and the call for advanced battery consortium grants proposed in his own first State of the State.

But, just as he did in the town hall with Assembly Member Keith Wright in Harlem right before the short, dejected press conference the day the last Times article broke, he focused on his self-cast role as the only man willing and able to save the economy.

“In March, we’re going to have to pay nearly $14 billion of debt that we owe. Half of it started to be run up in 2004. People just thought that they could put off ’til tomorrow what you had to do today,” he said. “And why did I have to be the one standing there when the day of reckoning came?”

A light ripple of uneasy laughter passed through the crowd.

“But I am grateful,” he said. “I have often thought about whether or not I wanted to run for governor before I made the announcement. And I thought, you know what I could do? I could not run for governor and hold the line. But then I’m worried about what’s going to happen later on, so I’m going to run for governor and hold the line.”

No one got it, he said, over and over again. No one gets that 48 out of 50 states are running up deficits, that 42 states have already begun state employee layoffs, 28 states have started to abandon early childhood education, Vermont has cut its court system to four and a half days per week, Utah has cut its workforce to four days per week, Hawaii has cut its school day to four days per week. No one gets that 11 states are nearing default.

Whatever else was being said, whatever rumors were being spread, whatever questions about him and his aides and his daily schedule, whatever allegations of misconduct and mismanagement, he was the first public official in the country to sound the alarm on the recession, and the only person, according to him, who had kept that recession from engulfing New York when it arrived. That was it, he said. That was enough. Case closed.

Winding up the speech, he set himself the odd goal of getting people to cheer at the fact that their own misfortunes were at least less than those poor saps in Utah.

But they did. At least among this small chunk of voters, Paterson was finally connecting.

“New York has only once delayed any payments. New York has paid its debt on time. New York has a strong credit rating,” he said, finally whipping the room into an enthusiastic applause. “And I’m the governor. And I think just that is an endorsement of me to run and keep the ship afloat at a time when other states are sinking.”

As Paterson worked the reporters and the room for a few more minutes, the television cameras crammed between the restaurant backdoor and his SUV, scrambling for one more shot. Paterson brushed past them, climbing into the backseat next to his wife. The motorcade drove off, the final Harlem stop of his announcement tour delayed until what would turn out to be never.

In the pilot’s lounge of the Buffalo airport private terminal, Paterson sat at a conference table, reflecting on the weekend’s speeches before boarding the state plane down to Washington. His wife sat behind him, tapping on her BlackBerry. Clemmie Harris sat a few seats over from her, staring straight ahead. David Johnson had not been with him the whole weekend, though it would be days before he was asked the first question by the Times about the domestic violence and obstruction of justice allegations.

He was tired and hoarse and a little distant, but, he said, he was feeling good.

“I enjoy being governor. I want to make the decisions. I want the ball. I think I should be leading the state for the next four years. And I have felt that way all along,” he said. “I did think about the fact that when you’re running and you’re making tough decisions at the same time, this is not going to help your popularity. But I’ve decided to weigh my fortunes on this: that the public will hear me, that they will eventually hear me.”

Most politicians promise a brighter tomorrow—more jobs, more optimism, more confidence. Paterson offered doomsday.

“I think if I’m not there, no one will be beating the drum to the extent that the public has been able to understand the crisis as it stands right now. There will be continued deficit in this state—we still have a $60 billion debt over five years. I think that, just depending on the governor’s style, I think a Republican governor might fight some of those issues but will be just dismissed, and a Democratic governor will try to affect compromise with the special interests who’ve made it clear they’re not compromising,” he said. “So either the Democratic governor will get rolled and the Legislature will just start adding more debt onto the problem, or the Democratic governor will realize, ‘Oh, I guess David Paterson did try to work with them and they just didn’t want to work with anyone,’ and then start copying literally everything I’m doing—and probably calling me to ask.”

The drumbeat that people were hearing instead, though, was the scandal after scandal, the misstep after misstep, the pile-on. In Hempstead, Rochester and West Seneca, he had tried to provide for every why—show a record, show strength, show that there was a could and that there was a should for his campaign. But by the time the world met Sherr-una Booker, they did not even need to read the allegations. Paterson had become, as he said to reporters while defiantly ending his campaign, a “celebrity cartoon character.”

At that last press conference, flanked by the last remains of his senior staff, Paterson made one more stab at the themes of his stump speech: the $33 billion in cuts, the foundation for fiscal stability he laid, the playing field he leveled, the dispatch of so many issues that had rankled state government for years. Like George W. Bush in his lowest moments, Paterson suggested, he would be judged better by history than by New Yorkers in 2010.

---

“I think if I’m not there,” Paterson said,

“either the Democratic governor will get

rolled and the Legislature will just start

adding more debt onto the problem, or the

Democratic governor will realize, ‘Oh, I

guess David Paterson did try to work with

them and they just didn’t want to work with

anyone,’ and then start copying literally

everything I’m doing—and probably

calling me to ask.”

---

“All of these measures and others have improved the quality of life for New Yorkers immediately, but will have values for generations,” he said, sticking his finger in the eye of public opinion one last fruitless time.

He would be cleared of any wrongdoing. He would save the state, even though no one was going to care, no one was going to give him credit for it. He held up his hand in a mock oath, gave the photographers their shot.

This time when asked about the attorney general’s presumed candidacy, the governor spoke kindly, said he had already called to offer his support. He tried to smile.

But that Sunday morning in the airport, bitterness tinged his voice. He was already tired of the guessing game, tired of deflecting questions about when he thought Cuomo would just go ahead and announce already. Even coming off the end of his campaign kick-off, dejection was already seeping into his sense of righteous determination.

 “First he said he’s running in March. Then he said he’s running in April,” Paterson said. “I really think he wants to announce two days before the primary, get swept into office, and then next year, should he win, and people find out that they never really knew if he knew anything about the executive service, they’ll be asking me: why didn’t I make a better case?”