David Paterson and the Art of the Leak

Voters were “stunned” and also “dumbstruck,” said the AP. It was just a “bombshell,” this admission from the governor.

This was August 12, 2004. “You’re right,” said David Lee Miller on Fox News. “This is nothing less than a stunning announcement broadcast live.”

But who was stunned?

“Oh, you know, I don’t know that anybody was really surprised to find out that Jim McGreevey was gay,” Herb Jackson of The Record of Hackensack said on CNN that night.

Jeff Pillets wrote in the next day’s edition of The Record: “‘All of us knew it, the press knew it and the governor was forced to live this horrible lie,’ said one Democrat who worked closely with McGreevey.”

It didn’t help that McGreevey lied to an AP reporter who, that summer, finally just asked him if he was gay.

Nobody printed it anyway.

And now we have to know about the three-ways with Jim and Dina (who a friend describes as the woman with “the voice like a humping cat from Tenafly”) and that baby-fat-faced Rutgers student. Can anyone ever look at a plate of TGI Friday’s Sesame Jack Chicken Strips the same way again?

♦ ♦ ♦

News of state-capital filth trickles out in confused fits and starts. One of the jobs of Albany-based reporters might even be to protect us from knowing certain things.

But over the past week, the mangled rumors flew. People were asking: Which public official liked to get handsy in the back of a cab? Which one, if any, has a son by someone who is not his wife, a child who is nearly the same age as his son by his wife? Who had a girlfriend put on whose staff, where her job was essentially to lobby the girlfriend’s former flame?

Any crisis publicist will tell you that the only way to deal with these things, should they happen to apply to you, is to shove them out there yourself.

New York’s smart new governor, David Paterson, is the first—after the failings of McGreevey, Eliot Spitzer, Kwame Kilpatrick, that jokester Larry Craig and shall we go on?—to try it.

Sort of.

♦ ♦ ♦

Here’s something odd. Why did the Patersons submit to carefully conducted sit-downs with Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News, in which they each broke the news of an affair—when the new governor would then, fourteen and a half hours after that story was published, go on to announce affairs with a whole herd of other women?

There’s a public-relations strategy gone somehow off the rails there. For one thing, it pissed everyone off.

In the long and dark intervening hours between the Daily News story at 10 p.m. Monday and Paterson’s press conference at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, some tried to say what they couldn’t quite say.

“Neither Paterson nor his wife identified the individuals with whom they cheated. This would, of course, become more of an issue if the woman with whom Paterson had an affair is or was on the state payroll,” Liz Benjamin wrote on the Daily News’ Daily Politics blog.

Oh, look, it turned out one of the women was.

“It was not clear if he had subsequent relationships outside his marriage,” Danny Hakim posted at The New York Times.

Oh, but he did.

So the full disclosure to the Daily News wasn’t actually a full disclosure. That made the next disclosure suspect. And the one after that?