The call came early into then-Lt. Gov. David Paterson's dark wood-trimmed chamber that March morning a year ago. He took the phone, closed the door and listened to Gov. Eliot Spitzer say he was quitting.
Paterson called his father and his wife, and then said a prayer.
The year that followed Spitzer's shocking fall amid a prostitution scandal reads like a three-act play of tragedy, comedy and more tragedy, astounding for its political turmoil even by New York's flamboyant standards.
New York's first blind, black governor began as a heroic figure. He had a dazzling intellect, memorizing long speeches sharpened by precise statistics, colored with stanzas of classic poetry and delivered with the timing of a Catskills comic. In his first months at the top, he was courted by presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and was a hot guest for “The Colbert Report.'' At the National Press Club, he was among the first to warn the economy was collapsing and called for a federal stimulus before Obama was elected.
A few months later he'd be ridiculed as a Pinocchio in a New York tabloid; his missteps in a tortuous U.S. Senate appointment would alienate America's pre-eminent political family; and “Saturday Night Live'' would repeatedly portray him as clueless.
“There was so much to do, it was overwhelming and I just acted on instinct,'' Paterson told The Associated Press Thursday. “Then later in the year, the issues kept coming ... There was a point when I thought to myself, `When is this going to end?'''
Things were different right from the start.
On March 17, he delivered a masterful 26-minute inauguration speech with a call for healing after Spitzer's fall and year of bloody gridlock with the Legislature.
Then, as the gathered lawmakers cheered, the kid from Harlem bellowed: “Let me reintroduce myself. I am David Paterson and I am the governor of New York!''
Almost immediately afterward, he revealed he had had affairs. There were the usual Albany rumors of girlfriends but the Spitzer campaign didn't even look into them when considering Paterson for lieutenant governor. Now in the top spot, Paterson knew reporters were scrambling to confirm the rumors that mattered little when he was a Senate backbencher. So he got out in front, saying he wanted to come clean so he wouldn't be compromised.
Governors are most powerful when their polls are rising.
Paterson was surfing and looking to capitalize.
Within days, he pressured legislators to cut hundreds of millions in spending from Spitzer's 2008-09 budget proposal. They accepted some of his cuts and the budget was less than a governor's proposal for the first time anyone could remember.
Then, after the session's end in June, he made a rare statewide TV address to warn of recession and the need to confront special interests. He threatened to call lawmakers back from “vacation'' to address a fiscal crisis.
New Yorkers loved the new boss.
“The public was liking David Paterson as he was talking about the difficult times,'' said Steven Greenberg of the Siena College poll. “They gave him credit for being honest with them and saying the right things.''
But then came a series of missteps that made headlines:
-- The state paid $21,000 for two exotic rugs at the governor's mansion.
-- A tabloid revealed Charles O'Byrne, Paterson's chief of staff who was viewed as the glue that held the governor together, hadn't paid taxes for five years. He said he was suffering from depression during that time and paid the taxes back.
-- Democrats finally won the Senate majority but internal bickering immediately threatened their newfound power. Paterson intervened but the deal he brokered fell apart.
_ He called the Legislature back to a special economic session
in November; After 90 minutes, lawmakers walked out without acting.
-- His budget proposal was assailed by special interests who launched multimillion dollar TV ads that have punished governors before. They worked. Unable to match the campaign or pierce it from the bully pulpit, his polls started to slide.
-- Amid his dire calls of impending economic collapse and the need for everyone to share the pain, he was sharply criticized for planning a trip to Switzerland for an economic summit. He canceled the trip.
-- He reorganized his staff, a shuffle that gave raises to top aides even while saving $2 million in payroll.
-- He rang up a $23,000 bill to attend Obama's inauguration, eventually agreeing to pay it with campaign funds.
The biggest hit came on what was a rare political opportunity. In December, Obama nominated Hillary Rodham Clinton to be secretary of state and Paterson had the sole authority to appoint her successor in the U.S. Senate.
But his secretive process was attacked from the beginning, marred by leaks, his own mixed signals and the star power of candidate Caroline Kennedy who he pumped up, then abandoned as she fizzled. Hours after Kennedy's puzzling midnight withdrawal, a person close to Paterson peddled stories to reporters that Kennedy had problems with a nanny, taxes and her marriage -- none of which were substantiated.
And New Yorkers hated it.
“This was becoming too crazy, too unmanageable,'' Paterson remembered. “That's when was I reacting, rather than acting.''
“Not only was the Senate selection drawn out, it was messy and people wanted serious purpose on the economy,'' said Lee Miringoff of the Marist College poll. “And that sort of drove home for a lot people that he wasn't flying the ship on the economy, either. I think that's why he bottomed out.''
By February, Paterson was called dithering and odds were against him winning election in 2010. His approval rating went from 64 percent to an unheard of 26 percent. He was less popular than Spitzer was when he resigned.
So Paterson brought O'Byrne back as an unpaid leader on his 2010 campaign, signed on some old Clinton hands and began trying to create “steadfast discipline and organization.''
“I realized that no matter what else was going on, I've got to stop, get my house in order, and almost within a few days I could feel the same stability,'' he said.
“His year was almost as turbulent as his entrance,'' said Doug Muzzio, a politics professor at Baruch College. “His grade is incomplete, but he's going to have to work harder, and smarter.''
“I haven't exactly floated through life,'' Paterson said. A high school guidance counselor told him his blindness would keep him from graduating a year early. A summer job in college lost because of his disability sapped his self-image for a semester. His second year of law school seemed too daunting. In the end, he wasn't stopped.
“I had personally and politically the posture of being counted out,'' he said. “We're really measured by our resilience, not by the fact that there are difficult periods.''
