Governor Paterson doesn’t just use campaign cash for his girlfriends…
The good governor likes to spend his campaign cash on himself as well. According to a story in the New York Daily News yesterday, “Gov. Paterson spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on personal items like hotel stays, men’s suits, home furnishings and bar tabs, documents released Friday show.”
Predictably, “Paterson’s aides defended his behavior, insisting none of the expenditures was improper because everything was repaid.”
I might be able to think up a worse excuse, but it would take some effort. Think this through: the governor is at a Men’s Warehouse and he picks out $1,075.90 in clothing. He arrives at the checkout counter, takes out his wallet, AND CHOOSES THE CAMPAIGN FUND CREDIT CARD. I might be more understanding if this only happened once, but this same scenario played itself out at a furniture store, a Manhattan restaurant, an Albany hotel bar, and another clothing store in Albany.
This would be like stealing $100 from your roommate to pay your credit card bill, and then justifying the action because you paid him back when you were caught.
I had a roommate like that. When we finally caught him red-handed, we threw him out of the house.
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Occam
In a previous post, I pointed out that Paterson was actually not the nations first blind governor. Bob Cowly of Arkansas was when he filled in briefly because Dale Bumpers was elected to the US senate and his term of office as Senator started on Jan 3, Arkansas Governor is not inagurated until January 14th so the blind Lieutenant Governor filled in until David Pryor assumed office. It is possible that Bob Cowley may still be the Longest serving blind governor at 11 days?
It seems unlikely at this point. The average person doesn’t seem to care about the new governor’s lawbreaking. Part of it is likely scandal fatigue, but if these revelations keep piling up, David Soares - the enterprising DA of Albany County, might start an investigation and seek criminal charges. We’ll just have to see how this develops in the coming weeks.