Governor Paterson was back at the scene of the crime today, attempting to wipe the slate clean and put the lid on what has been a disastrous campaign on his part of critiquing the "orchestrated" treatment of him from the media and how it illustrates that we are not in a postracial society. Paterson returned to the Errol Louis's radio show where he first made the remarks last week. Today he said, "I was wrong to get into an assessment of how the media views me. I do not think that race has anything to do with my poll numbers anything to do with my political issues in this day, and shouldn’t have said it. Straight out."
Despite today's mea culpa, the governor's stance still seems to remain all over the map. Just yesterday while out on Long Island, he said, "My remarks never say that there's a race element at all. But I didn't blame my problems on that, and I'm not changing the remarks I made." And even today after saying he was wrong, the News's Elizabeth Benjamin describes the rest of the radio interview as being "in true Paterson style, the longer he spoke, the murkier the situation became."
Paterson continued to go on the offensive about Dominic Carter of NY1 calling out his recent late-night stay at a Manhattan nightclub where Carter mistakenly believed the governor's daughter to be under 18 (she's 21). Paterson said today, "It leads to the notion of a stereotype of African Americanism: 'They're hanging out, they're in the club, they're drinking and they have no regard for their children." Both Paterson and Carter have demanded apologies from one another. Carter told the Observer, "What he's really saying is that I shouldn't cover the governor straight up. I should give him an advantage because I'm African-American and he's African-American."
And City Councilman Carles Barron threw in his two cents, joining the list of politicians to chastise Governor Paterson this week—but the first to do so for his apology. Barron said, “He shouldn’t have done the political moonwalk on this. That’s not a courageous thing to do."
