Albany Starts To Wonder at Paterson:Concerns Grow Over His Ability To Carry Out the Governorship
Concern is growing in Albany over the prospect that, even as Governor Paterson races to get on top of the budget crisis, the disclosures of his private sexual affairs have damaged — perhaps irreparably — his capacity to execute the state’s highest office.
Dogged by suspicions that his campaign expenditures and his extramarital relationships were improperly entangled, Mr. Paterson heads into his second week on the job no longer the fresh face who symbolized a return to civility, but a weakened politician.
“Paterson’s persona has been really damaged,” a politics professor at Baruch College, Doug Muzzio, said. “On Monday, he was sitting on top of the world. It was, ‘I am David Paterson and I am governor of New York.’ It now becomes, ‘I am David Paterson and I am this philandering, pay-for-it-with-other-people’s-money type of guy,’”
For the third consecutive day, Mr. Paterson struggled to account for a 2002 payment, billed to the credit card of his campaign committee, for an Upper West Side hotel room where Mr. Paterson had a sexual liaison.
The governor, who served as lieutenant governor under Eliot Spitzer, has also been unable to explain the circumstances behind a $500 campaign payment to a woman with whom he was romantically involved.
Meanwhile, Paterson officials sought to provide details about more than $11,000 in payments that his campaign committee made between 2002 and 2007 to a 45-year-old woman, April Robbins-Bobyn, whose connection to Mr. Paterson is not clear.
A spokesman for Mr. Paterson identified her as a woman who served as a staffer in Mr. Paterson’s Senate Democratic office in Manhattan when Mr. Paterson served as Senate minority leader. The spokesman later said he was mistaken and that the woman was a campaign aide.
A receptionist who picked up the phone at the Senate Democratic office, however, said Ms. Robbins-Bobyn “no longer” works there. […]
Long article worth the read. Poor NY! Poor us!
If he is pushed out, IIRC, we will have a Republican Governor!