If I lived in New York, I’d be giving serious consideration to voting for the Republican candidate in the next gubernatorial race. Not so much because the Republican’s bound to be a great candidate, but because there’s pretty strong evidence that New York’s Democratic governors don’t so much give a damn about women.
First, we had former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a rising star in the Democratic Party nationally who ended up having to resign when it turned out he was soliciting prostitutes the way some people order pizza. That might have been forgivable, had 1) Prostitution been legal, 2) Spitzer not made his mark as a prosecutor by going after prostitution, or 3) Spitzer not been caught moving enough money around to spend on prostitutes that it drew the attention of bank regulators.
Spitzer ultimately wasn’t prosecuted, but he was forced from office ignominiously, and in his place New Yorkers got Gov. David Paterson, who immediately announced that he had had affairs in his lifetime. Okay, well, that’s not good. But points for honesty. And surely, surely, Paterson would keep himself on the straight-and-narrow after seeing what happened to his predecessor.
Or, you know, he might decide instead to obstruct justice in a domestic violence case:
Gov. David A. Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who had accused his close aide of assaulting her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the governor’s actions.
Mr. Paterson instructed his press secretary, Marissa Shorenstein, to ask the woman to publicly describe the episode as nonviolent, according to a third person, who was briefed on the matter. That description would contradict the woman’s accounts to the police and in court.
Mr. Paterson also enlisted another state employee, Deneane Brown, a friend of both the governor and the accuser, to make contact with the woman before she was due in court to finalize an order of protection against the aide, David W. Johnson, the two people with direct knowledge said. Ms. Brown, an employee of the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, reached out to the woman on more than one occasion over a period of several days and arranged a phone call between the governor and the woman, Mr. Johnson’s companion.
After the calls from Ms. Brown and the conversation with the governor, the woman failed to appear for the court hearing on Feb. 8, and the case was dropped.
It was probably a minor issue, though. MRAs are always telling me that you can get an order of protection for any reason at all. I’m sure she was just mad that the stunning floral bouquet that her charming boyfriend gave her had only seventeen roses in it. I mean, surely, she didn’t have a good reason to get this order, right?
Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend had accused him of choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help during a Halloween altercation in the Bronx apartment they shared.
Oh. Um…well. That’s…a pretty damn good reason, actually.
So to recap: a woman is assaulted, goes to the police, and begins the work of getting an order of protection. The Governor of New York — the Governor of New York — uses his aides to put pressure on her to drop the case, because the assailant is on his staff.
Frankly, as someone who cares about women’s rights, I’d rather have the guy who just liked sex with prostitutes.
But of course, Paterson is blameless in this. I mean, he didn’t know that the attack was as severe as it was.
Mr. Paterson has stated that he was unaware of the details of the case until The Times reported them, and has said he did nothing improper.
See? He had no way of knowing that the case involved someone slamming someone’s face into a dresser. And no way of finding out. Which is why he immediately got mixed up in the case, because…uh…the woman was probably lying.
Okay, actually, that’s not a very good excuse.
Paterson has already announced he won’t stand for election in the fall. If today’s allegations are true, then that doesn’t go far enough. Like his predecessor, Paterson should resign, before the day is out. Paterson injected himself into a criminal case on the side of an assailant. At best, he did so recklessly, assuming that the — again — criminal case was not so serious as it really was. At worst, he did so with malice, seeking to get the exact result he did — a woman who, faced with pressure from the office of the governor, gave up on her criminal case because she saw more pain going forward with it than any relief justice could give her.
Either way, Paterson has demonstrated that he is unfit to serve as Governor of New York. Maybe Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch can do better than the two moral lightweights to precede him this term. He certainly can’t do much worse.
This. But Patterson won’t resign. He honestly doesn’t seem to think that what he did was all that bad. He was actually still planning to run ’til a few days ago.
And hell, at this point I’m not sure I want him to resign. As we go down the chain of command, these guys just get worse and worse — Spitzer was at least competent, aside from his prostitute jones; Patterson isn’t even that. I worry the next guy down will just shut the whole state government down and order every woman in the state to turn in her birth control, or something.
Y’all need a good Republican governor! Like Mark Sanford! He respects women so much, he {insert your own joke here. Commenter still sleepy.}
Pingback: UrbanGrounds | A History of Misogyny from NY’s Democrat Governors
You had me until your first sentence.
No, really–what is it about this that suggests to you it’s a problem endemic to the Democratic candidates or something that wouldn’t be a problem for the Republican candidates as well?
And, more to the point, can you point to any serious effort on the part of the Republican Party to put in place laws that protect women from violence and/or allow women hurt by violence to get some sort of justice?
Patterson, from the view on the other side of the country but w/ links to NY, appears to be a legendarily incompetent and just plain bad governor. If there was a hall of fame for incompetent and bad governors it might be named after him. At the very least he’d have his own wing.
Robert — except for one tiny, minor difference: cheating on your wife is not a crime (nor should it be). Soliciting prostitutes and obstructing an investigation (while giving cover to a woman-beater? Yeah, those things are illegal.
If you threw out every major politician who cheated on his wife (or boyfriend, don’t want to leave Barney Frank out), we wouldn’t have any elected officials.
Not covering for Sanford, ’cause he’s an asswipe deserving of scorn and political-unemployment, but Paterson and Spitzer are criminals.
A bit of an unfortunate simile, don’t you think?
Cheating on his boyfriend? Barney Frank had a soliciting operation running out of his apartment. He claimed he knew nothing about it, but I’ve always had a very hard time believing that.
Then Illinois would have to get it’s own building – with one wing comprised of prison cells.
This whole mess is just another almost breathtaking example of the sense of entitlement that so many elected officials have, regardless of party.
You had me until your first sentence.
No, really–what is it about this that suggests to you it’s a problem endemic to the Democratic candidates or something that wouldn’t be a problem for the Republican candidates as well?
To be fair, the GOP is probably precisely as bad in their own way. But this is 0-for-2 on Democratic governors in a very short span. And while perhaps voting Republican isn’t the answer, it is at least very clear that there are plenty of Democrats who do not so much view women as equal, full, and complete members of society. As a Democrat, I have a moral obligation to rail against them — and, yes, to stand against them if need be.
Jeff, there’s a lot to be said for just keeping them hopping – put a Democrat in for one term, a Republican in for the next term, and just keep switching them up so that no one party builds their power base up too far. In this case it would also teach them that people are at least paying attention and will react if you go too far. That’s how Chicago got it’s first (and so far only) female mayor.
Think what they’ll figure they can get away with if you DONT vote them out.
If Paterson resigns, I don’t know if Ravitch, or Cuomo, or really any Democrat can win. People will note that two Democratic governors havve resigned in one four-year term and say “what the hell happens to Democrats when they get elected governor?” But that price is well worth holding Paterson accountable for this (even aside from the sort of Republican who’s sufficiently popular in population centers to be elected Governor in the first place). Particularly since the whiff of impropriety will be with the Democrat in any case, whether Paterson stays, resigns, keels over, ascends bodily to Heaven, whatever.
Jake Squid:
He’s that too, but in politics that’s supposed to be taken care of at the polls, in one sense of the term or another: either you don’t get re-elected or it becomes so clear you won’t be early on that you don’t bother running. As far as his incompetence, the system worked.