A Curious State of Affairs

Ask around, and you hear encomiums like that as well as lots of anecdotes about how he's refused to allow his legal blindness to impede him. These stories are always pitched as "Look at how unhindered the man is" -- but they also underscore that, as "The Daily Show" recently put it, Paterson is "Mr. Magoo blind, not Ray Charles blind."

"Soon after I got married, I walked into a grocery store and saw him reading the back of a cereal box," says Michael Benjamin, an assemblyman from the Bronx. "I said to my wife, 'That's David Paterson.' And she was like, 'That can't be. He's legally blind.' "

* * *

Actually, he's legally blind and he can read, though it isn't easy. Paterson lost nearly all of his vision at the age of 3 months, after an ear infection damaged his optic nerve, blinding him totally in one eye and severely limiting his vision in the other. As a child, his parents moved to Long Island in search of a school that would teach him in regular, rather than special education, classes.

He graduated from Columbia University and Hofstra Law School, though he failed the bar because, as he told the New York Observer in 2006, the exam didn't sufficiently accommodate his impairment and he simply ran out of time. In 1983 he took a job at the Queens district attorney's office as a "criminal law associate," and though he wanted to eventually retake the bar, he was elected to the state Senate in 1986 and never left politics.

Staffers say they help Paterson cope by keeping his reading to a bare minimum, recording tapes of briefings and memos. When he gives a speech, he commits it to memory or speaks extemporaneously.

"We'd just give him the facts and details on a given issue, and everything that came out of his mouth would be his own," says Karen Boykin-Towns, Paterson's chief of staff for four years. "I never saw him utilize a prepared text of any kind."

He can make out shapes if they're close enough, and tells time with a watch that has very large hands. At events, staffers tip off Paterson about who is in the room, but Boykin-Towns was always amazed at the number of names the guy could instantly put to a voice.

"People are forever testing him," she says. "Like, 'Hey David, do you know who this is?' It always bothered me, but he'd just say, 'Of course I know who you are,' and then say their names. I guess you wouldn't call a memory like his photographic, but it's pretty amazing."

Legal blindness hasn't curtailed his athletic interests, either. He can do standing back flips -- he did at his wedding, a friend reports -- and he plays basketball, with an aggressive move to the hoop, according to Darryl Towns, an assemblyman and Boykin-Towns's husband. "Like every guy I've ever played from Harlem," he said. "Talks a lot, too."

You sort of forget about his vision problem, friends say, until something odd happens.

"There was this time when he hailed a taxi and this guy picked him up and brought him downtown," says Eric Schneiderman, a state senator and friend. "And David said, 'How much do I owe you?' And the guy said, 'I'm not a taxi driver. I just thought I'd give you a lift.' "

* * *

For a man in public life for so long, surprisingly little is known about Paterson's politics. As a state senator, he sponsored a bill that would have legalized the use of force against a police officer making a wrongful arrest. But the Democrats haven't had control of the Senate in New York for decades, and the minority party in this state has about as much pull as a refrigerator magnet. It's one thing to sponsor legislation that hasn't a prayer of passing, and another to propose a law when you're governor.

So what will a Paterson administration look like? A senior administration official calls him a "Vaclav Havel pragmatist," which could mean a lot of different things. If the events of this week prove anything, it's that Paterson skipped the fine-tooth-comb treatment that is typically applied to people in jobs like his. And that means the state, like Paterson, is in uncharted waters.

"You've got to understand, this guy has not really had to cast an important vote in his entire career," says Robert Bellafiore, who was press secretary for former governor George Pataki. "He's gone from a job with a tiny staff to running 200,000 employees in a state with a budget of $124 billion. That's the story here. He's gone from a position with no authority, to a job with the ultimate authority, in the span of a week."