It goes one of two ways for David Paterson, another politician out of New York who doesn't know when to shut up any more than Hillary Clinton does.Here is one: Paterson continues to give us way more information about his past than any of us ever needed, and they run him out of Albany faster than his predecessor ran working girls out of hotel rooms. The other is that he stops giving interviews now, stops acting as if that's his day job, and begins to show if he actually has the chops for a job he clearly never expected to have in the years when he was, in the words of the late, great Warren Zevon, making out like Charlie Sheen.
If Paterson can't manage that, an old Albany boss named Joe Bruno ends up acting governor for a few months, then Mike Bloomberg gets the special election he wants in the fall, and Bloomberg essentially succeeds one kind of frisky crusader - Spitzer - the way he did when he succeeded another frisky crusader, Rudy Giuliani, to become mayor of New York.
Bloomberg says he's not interested in being governor. Generally with him, when he says one thing about his political ambitions you throw it all down and bet the other way.So that is one scenario for Paterson, one that takes him across the clown line forever. The other is that he really does learn how to stop acting as if he's talking to Dr. Phil instead of to us.
Because up to now the only thing David Paterson hasn't told us is that he had to dodge sniper fire on his way to his next girlfriend. Paterson apparently expects New York Democrats to start singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" because he's the governor who didn't have to pay for it, even as college kids start to think hanging with him would be a lot more fun on spring break than going to Florida.
"[Paterson] is a progressive and a decent guy," Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, someone who knows Paterson from Albany, was saying yesterday. "But he needs to understand that the political climate in this country right now, this whole presidential election, is about character. If there's one message that the American people are sending, it's that. We all ought to be listening."
Brodsky, a Hillary Clinton supporter, was asked if that includes the United States senator from New York as well as the new governor of the state. "It means all of us," he said.
But both the governor of New York and the senator from New York get called out on character now, and judgment. Why? Because neither knows when to zip it, that's why. Paterson keeps telling us about all the women he's had - send up a flare if you think there aren't more to come - and his Delta House past. And Hillary Clinton talks herself into a world of trouble by making a trip to Bosnia in 1996 sound as if it were a scene out of "Black Hawk Down" when it wasn't anything of the kind.
This is what Sen. Clinton said last week in a speech, referencing that trip to Bosnia, in her mind another example of her former career as an international troubleshooter: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into vehicles to get to our base."
That was last week. On Monday, here is what Clinton said when asked about that trip to Bosnia by columnist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News: "We had to have our bulletproof stuff on because of the threat of sniper fire. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but there was this 8-year-old girl and, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her - so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left. Now that's my memory of it."
When pressed on the issue of her credibility by Bunch, she continued: "I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things - millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was a misstatement."
When she talks about how she misspoke and misstatements, she starts to sound like Roger Clemens. No, she meant exactly what she said originally. It was a story that she thought she could get by with, in a campaign built on this whopper of a notion that she was practically co-President of the United States once. You can only imagine the hysterical reaction from her spokesman, Howling Wolfson, if Obama's version of something was this far from the truth.
"She originally talked about being worried about sniper fire and running for cover," Will Bunch said yesterday. "Then you look at the footage and there's her daughter Chelsea standing right next to her."
It is why the new governor of New York looks more honest talking about women on the side than the woman running for President looks talking about a trip abroad. Yesterday, Clinton was still answering questions about Bosnia even as she desperately wanted to change the subject back to Barack Obama's pastor, saying again that she misspoke and then adding this:
"I'm human which, you know, for some people is a revelation."
Not so much.
