Paterson Calls Reid's Comments on Obama “Reprehensible”

Paterson says Reid shouldn't lose his post over the remarks

Gov. David Paterson called Sen. Harry Reid's racial remarks about President Barack Obama reprehensible and degrading, but said the U.S. Senate majority leader shouldn't lose his post over the remarks.
    
Paterson, the New York's first black governor, said he feels that lawmakers on both side of the aisle who make a sincere apology shouldn't see their careers ruined over what he called ill-chosen remarks.

"I have said this -- not only when it was a Democrat or when it was a Republican -- that when people properly apologize for these types of mistakes that it doesn't merit destroying their careers," Paterson told reporters Monday in Albany.

Reid is quoted by journalists in a new book, "Game Change," as saying he was impressed by the nation's first black president whom Reid described as "light-skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

"But I would say that I thought the comments not only were reprehensible, but it's amazing to think to print a whole book, that so many people saw, and nobody noticed that this ill-chosen remark was in the book? Didn't anybody read the book before they put it out? I find it kind of shocking," said Paterson

It's a very intrusive and kind of degrading remark, but it's one that was probably close to a different kind of way of phrasing it which might have been acceptable," he said.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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