Getting out while the getting is good

President Obama is asking Gov. David Paterson, a fellow Democrat, to withdraw from the governor’s race, according to The New York Times. Paterson should consider obliging. As a matter of fact, why bother waiting until 2010? He should consider stepping down now.
If the Times report is true, which it probably is, Obama is right to call on Paterson to step aside. His conduct in office has been, well, erratic. That’s putting it nicely.
Take August. Paterson blamed his dismal approval ratings on a media more concerned with his skin color than his politics. He told the Daily News, “We’re not in the post-racial period,” saying that calls for him to drop out of the race were “being orchestrated.”
“It’s a game, and people who pay attention know that,” he said. “We have a media that doesn’t report the news. We have a media that wants to make the news.”
Shortly afterward, he recanted, telling the Daily News, “I was wrong to get into an assessment of how the media views me, and I do not think that race has anything to do with my poll numbers, with my political issues in this day, and [I] shouldn’t have said it, straight out.”
No, Paterson shouldn’t have said it. His low approval ratings — hovering in the 20 to 30 percent range — have more to do with the fact that he let the state Legislature implode in late spring, standing by haplessly until the very end as members of his own party sided with Republicans in an attempted coup that held up state business for a month and a half, cost taxpayers an estimated $5 million and made New York a national laughingstock.
Then there was the other little matter of his promising greater transparency in state budget negotiations and failing to deliver. Earlier this year, we saw one of the most closed budget processes in state history.
Oh, and then there was Paterson promising to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. When all was said and done after this year’s budget season, however, we saw the same old story. Legislators ran amok in Albany, riddling the budget with tens of millions in pork-barrel spending.