For all its sophistication, progressive blather and urban (and urbane) attitude, New York has some of the sleaziest, dirtiest, lowest-class, greediest, and most corrupt and embarrassing politicians in the nation.You've got to go far, maybe to Chicago, to find a political cauldron giving off the stink we're sniffing here at the crossroads of the world.
You've got addled Gov. David Paterson, spinning crazily this week over wild rumors that The New York Times is coming out with an article about his sexual and drug habits. The article has not appeared, and The Times, being The Times, refuses to comment. But the rumors have stirred up the buzzing media political establishment.
The hapless Paterson, enmeshed in some sort of psychodrama, has declared, "I have been depicted in a way that has been racialized, sexualized, hypersexualized and dissolute.''
Wait, there's more. "I'm black, I'm blind, and I'm still alive. How much better do they want me to be?" He was unloading himself on Wednesday on "Imus in the Morning'' on the Fox Business Channel, venting with radio host Don Imus, himself not the classiest act in town.
Paterson, who has being going hat in hand to media outlets to plead his case, covered himself in glory when, at a news conference on Tuesday in Albany, the state's capital, he said he would leave his office either by defeat at the ballot box or in a pine box. "The only way I'm not going to be governor next year is at the ballot box, and the only way that I'll be leaving office before is in a box." Great.
The governor's meltdown has long been in the making. A marginal politician who inherited whatever heft he had from his father, a powerful city pol, Paterson climbed from the state's No. 2 job to the big seat thanks to Gov. Eliot Spitzer (tough former prosecutor, aggressive campaigner, popular, big-time Democrat), whose sexual adventures with prostitutes forced him to resign in 2008. Paterson, immediately after being sworn in, let us know that he, too, had cheated on his wife.
Now it is 2010, election year. Paterson's popularity ratings are in the drain. Nobody wants him to run for a full term, nobody in the city, nobody in Albany, nobody in Washington. The White House -- Obama himself -- and the Democratic establishment are giving him the cold shoulder, signaling that they back Andrew Cuomo, the immensely popular state attorney general. No one is betting against Cuomo, who has not made an official announcement but is universally believed to be running.
Paterson's is not the only story stinking up the place.
What about the state senator who was expelled from the Legislature after his conviction for domestic assault for dragging his girlfriend down a hallway of his apartment building (he was acquitted of a charge that he slashed her face with broken glass, an incident his girlfriend now denies while she stands by her creep).
The expulsion marked the first time in a century that the Legislature has thrown out one of its own from office. That the State Senate, a place where mayhem, incompetence and low-down deals are rampant, took such bold action is seen as perhaps a sign that legislators who feed at the trough may be fed up with Albany shenanigans. More likely, the senators were fed up with their bumptious colleague, Hiram Monserrate, a Queens Democrat who used the threat of switching parties to gain whatever he wanted.
There's plenty more going on. Take City Councilman Larry B. Seabrook, a Bronx Democrat, who is accused of pocketing hundreds of thousands of city dollars for himself, his family and cronies. He was indicted for fraud earlier this week, charged with funneling about $1.2 million in City Council discretionary money (better known as the "slush fund") to nonprofits he controlled. Seabrook is likely to see some jail time, just like ex-Councilman Miguel Martinez, a fellow Democrat, who is behind bars for fraud.
Whatever else, Seabrook is stuck with the tabloid label "Bagel Larry" for doctoring a $7 receipt for a bagel sandwich and diet soda in order to get $177 in reimbursement.