Give David Paterson this: when someone rights the definitive social history of how America came to rethink its acceptance of the pundits' conventional wisdom that sexual immorality is the only moral issue that can drive a politician into the wilderness, never to return, he'll merit at least a footnote. In March 2008, when word got out that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had frequented prostitutes, Spitzer's reputation flatlined. No one ever liked the guy much, and the revelations about his personal life made him look like the skeeviest kind of hypocrite, and so the dogs were turned on him without mercy. New York magazine ran a typically delicate, elliptical cover illustration by Barbara Kruger, showing a full-body photograph of a smiling Spitzer with an arrow labeled "BRAINS" pointing to his crotch; as with Bill Clinton in 1998, the last-ditch argument for people who really aren't fascinated by politicians' sex lives but didn't want to be left out of the pile-on was that, by getting laid outside his marriage, he'd proven that he was too dumb to hold elective office. Now, less than two years later, Spitzer is already back, an official wise man figure, much in demand on TV talk shows and public speaking engagements; he writes a column for Slate. Part of his speeded-up rehabilitation has to do with the economic collapse in 2008; Spitzer is regarded as being smart about financial issues, and of course, he had the advantage of not being in office, and so not an obvious scapegoat, when everything went to hell. But he still couldn't have begun to seem so brilliant in retrospect if his replacement, Paterson, hadn't come to seem so lackluster, simultaneously ineffectual and disastrous. In took Richard Nixon about ten years to be officially reclassified a Statesman in Winter by the media, and he had been able to bathe in the reflected dullness of Jerry Ford.

Paterson survived a meeting with President Obama in which it was practically suggested that he'd wake up to find a horse's head in his bed if he didn't bow the hell out of this year's governor's race, only to announce earlier today that he won't run, following yesterday's publication of a New York Times story alleging that the Guv and the cops might have been involved in a cover-up to protect one of his aides, David W. Johnson, "who had risen from working as Mr. Paterson’s driver and scheduler to serving in the most senior ranks of the administration", and who has been accused of assaulting a woman he was living with. (And by the way, what is it with New York pols and this strange pattern of them selecting the scariest thug who polishes their apples and grandly elevating them to the highest echelons of power? Maybe, someday, Johnson and Bernie Kerik can be brought together, so they can argue over who gets the top bunk.)

I was under the impression that Paterson had about as much popular support as a return to Prohibition, but it didn't take long after the Times posted its first news of his decision before somebody chimed in to insist that the poor bastard had been the victim of a race-driven conspiracy to bring down the black man. Seeing that, posted at an hour when it seemed unlikely that anyone had done much drinking already today, really gave me a jolt; it took me back to the '90s, when some people, uneasy about the coming post-racial America, were so desperate to see racial victimization where none existed that they were ready to take up a collection for Marion Barry. In New York, the unfettered NYPD of the Giuliani era were always eager to meet racial paranoids more than halfway, but things have calmed down so much since Rudy left thatit never occurred to me that anyone would think to try to revive that kind of thing on behalf of a human speed bump like Paterson. You can get nostalgic for anything, I guess.