Hello, Govna

 Who is David Paterson?By Bill PetersChronicle Senior WriterDavid Paterson rose to the Office of the Governorship of New York from the Lieutenant Governorship on Monday, March 17th, following the resignation of Governor Elliot Spitzer due to a prostitution bust. He is only the third black governor since Reconstruction, the others being Patrick Duval, currently serving in Massachusetts and Douglas Wilder, who served from 1990-1994 in Virginia. He is also the second legally blind Governor (the first, Bob C. Riley, served as Governor of Mississippi for 11 days in 1975), having no vision in one eye and 20/400 in the other (meaning he sees at 20 feet what people with 20/20 see at 400 feet). This however, has apparently not affected his basketball game, where his opponents have characterized his playing as if he had a kind of sonar for the basket. He refused to learn braille as a child, so he reads by holding the page close to his functional eye for limited periods. Described as a “bright, gentle negotiator” by Professor and NYIT Chronicle faculty advisor William Lawrence, who had worked with him a few years back, Governor Paterson has been thrust into budget planning. He has been open with his unfamiliarity with the budget that former Governor Spitzer had been creating, saying that he had been working on other issues within the Administration. He is expected to be a much less combative governor than Spitzer was as he is well liked on both sides of the aisle, important for a Democratic Governor working with a state senate with a one-vote Republican majority. Democrats had been hoping to take over the State House for the first time in decades in November, but with the fallout from the Spitzer prostitution scandal uncertain it is no longer known if that is a possibility. Governor Paterson grew up in Harlem, the son of a warehouseman who became New York Secretary of State. He got his BA from Columbia University in History and a law degree from Hostfra Law School and worked in the Queens District Attorneys office, though not as a lawyer as he failed his Bar exam (he says due to insufficient accommodation for his blindness).