A Heavy-Handed, Counterproductive, Pointless Hit on Paterson

If someone ever gets around to writing The Handbook for Nudging Aside a Politically Toxic Governor So He/She Doesn’t Take Down the Whole Party, this one will probably appear in the chapter entitled “What Not To Do.”

President Obama and his political team either believed they could strong-arm David Paterson out of next year’s governor’s race without anyone getting wise to it, or they actively made it know that they were forcing him out.

And now they’ve gone and made a bad situation much, much worse—and, in the process, made it much harder for Paterson to ultimately back down on his own terms.

The fundamental miscalculation here is that without the White House’s intervention now, in mid-September 2009, Paterson would wind up running, disastrously, in a September 2010 primary.

But that’s nonsense. Yes, he’s been insisting that he’ll run, and there’s no doubt that he means it. But that doesn’t mean anything. The moment is still months off when key players in the state Democratic Party will have to make firm commitments for ’10.

Until then, Paterson can keep saying he’s running and Andrew Cuomo can keep playing coy. Then, when decision time comes sometime early next year, Cuomo can signal his readiness to run and everyone in the party can rush to join him. That’s when Paterson will suddenly realize that he wants to spend more time with his family or pursue public service in some other capacity or whatever, and then—while insisting with a straight face that he would beat Cuomo—announce that he won’t be a candidate in ’10.

That’s how it all should play out, at least. And it probably still will (more or less). But the White House’s conspicuous intervention changes the equation a bit.

First, it will be harder, and more demeaning, for Paterson to back down in the near future. To get out now would be to admit that the White House’s analysis is right (which it is) that Paterson is uniquely unelectable among all of the incumbent Democratic governors in the country. So now look for Paterson to double down and insist that—more than ever—he’s a candidate for ’10.

“I have said time and time again that I am running for governor next year,” he said at a parade on Sunday.

Longer-term, the White House’s move denies Paterson the self-delusion that would be key to his ultimate withdrawal. When politicians drop out of hopeless campaigns, their pride almost always dictates that they insist (against all evidence to the contrary) that they would have won anyway, and that they had some other reason for getting out. It’s absurd, yes, but we’re talking about human beings with big egos here.

The moment was (and probably still is) coming when Paterson would do the same thing. But he’ll need plausible deniability. Having the White House tell the world that he’s a goner and has lost their confidence will make it much harder for Paterson to tell himself that it’s O.K. to quit.

This may be the one case in which the following is true, but the Obama White House really should have followed George W. Bush’s example on this one.

Bush was confronted with a very similar situation in early 2002. At the time, Massachusetts Republican officials were desperate for Mitt Romney, then basking in the glow of his Winter Olympic stewardship, to return to the state and snatch the G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination from Jane Swift, the absurdly unpopular interim governor.

Like Paterson now, Swift was utterly unelectable in the fall, but was also adamant that she’d run anyway. To make things worse for the G.O.P., she didn’t hesitate to invoke gender, claiming that it was a gang of “powerful men” that was trying to push her aside.

Romney wanted to run, but he also wanted it to be clean—in other words, he wanted Swift out first. So he appealed to Karl Rove for help. But Rove understood that Swift was already a dead woman walking; all Romney had to do was say he’d run, and what was left of her support would evaporate instantly. So why get the White House involved?

Romney called the White House twice in ’02, the Boston Globe reported at the time, and both times he was told: “Jane's the incumbent governor, and she's our friend…She's been there for us, and we're going to be there for her.”   

Of course, they really weren’t there for her. Romney finally sucked it up and made a move on his own in March ‘02, and Swift dropped out about 24 hours later. The White House did nothing to stop him. But by staying out, their fingerprints weren’t all over Romney’s move—and Swift wasn’t able to rail against meddling from Washington.

Paterson’s fate is still likely to mirror Swift’s. But all the White House has accomplished is to make the process of getting from here to there a lot more messy and little more uncertain.