With the recent news that New York Gov. David Paterson plans to run again, against the wishes of the Obama administration, it seems like the perfect time to take a look at some New York politicians, both past and present. How much have they changed New York, or how much New York has changed them?

Past

Eliot Spitzer:

Spitzer certainly went out with a bang, but many New Yorkers, including myself, remember the age when the infamous Client No. 9 pledged to ‘toil each and every day so as not to disappoint the hard-working people of this state who have placed their trust in this future.’ I was pretty disappointed in the former governor March 2008.

Since then, Spitzer has undertaken an excellent public relations campaign. Although he has kept quiet these past two years, he did appear in a rare interview on ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’ this past April. What stunned me about Spitzer was not him coming out of hiding: it was the fact that he knew his stuff about the financial crisis, based on his years being the ‘Sheriff of Wall Street’ when he was New York attorney general. While he may not be a rising star, I feel we haven’t seen the last of Eliot Spitzer.

Rudolph Giuliani:

With eyes on the governorship and the title of New York City mayor on his resume, Giuliani seems poised for an interesting political future. But let’s remember that Giuliani hasn’t won an elected office in over a decade. Giuliani’s campaign for the presidency is akin to Napoleon’s campaign in Russia: they both ended in a tremendous loss.

Let’s give some credit to Giuliani. He was the mayor of New York during the largest civilian tragedy in the history of the nation; that shouldn’t be forgotten. He seems quite likely to be the Republican darling in the 2010 gubernatorial race.

Present:

Gov. David Paterson:

A Marist poll came out this month that had Paterson’s approval rating at 20 percent. That’s almost as bad as some of the numbers during the latter part of the George W. Bush administration. I have to wonder, why?

Paterson is doing as good of a job as he can with the conditions that he has been given. He inherited a scandal of epic proportions, an unruly mess of economic woes on Wall Street, and a tremendous budget deficit. It takes time to solve some of these problems, and Paterson deserves the benefit of the doubt on these issues.

I’m glad that he appointed an Upstate conservative Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, as senator to balance out the downstate, left-leaning Chuck Schumer. That’s not to say Schumer is a poor senator, but it helps to have multiple parts of the state and multiple interests represented at the highest level of government.

Andrew Cuomo: Cuomo seems to be the favorite in the 2010 race for governor without officially even entering. When asked during his attorney general campaign if he thought of running, Cuomo said, ‘I am ruling in nothing, ruling out nothing.’ Cuomo has a huge amount of support not only because his father, Mario Cuomo was governor from 1983 to 1994 but also because of his long record of investigations during his tenure as Attorney General.

Cuomo is not blemish-free, however. Village Voice writer Wayne Barrett has claimed: ‘Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions, between 1997 and 2001, that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that-in combination with other factors-helped plunge Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the sub-prime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.’

All things considered, voters should weigh their options and hold off their opinions of New York politicians until they look at some of the issues.

Andrew Swab is a sophomore magazine and international relations major. His columns appear weekly. He can be reached at ajswab@syr.edu.

Published on September 20, 2009 at 12:00 pm