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Paterson to talk to Times

by Ben Smith, February 08, 2010

Governor David Paterson will sit down for an interview with The New York Times tomorrow, a person familiar with the plan tells me, as his state chatters about an as-yet unpublished retrospective of his difficult year in office.

Paterson's style of running his public and private life have been issues since long before Eliot Spitzer made him lieutenant governor.

But the New York Post's Fred Dicker today summed up the state of play in Albany: complaints from insiders — growing noisier in the wake of the award of a gambling contract to a key state politico — about Paterson's "lack of focus on critical issues, his poor work habits and late-night, booze-fueled 'disappearances' at trendy nightclubs and undisclosed locations — when even his state police bodyguards don't know where he is [and] his penchant for spreading false rumors about aides and a peculiar reliance on two little-known assistants."

I don't have any first-hand reporting on what the Times is working on, and a spokeswoman for the paper, Diane McNulty, declined to comment.

The Times's internal standards, it's worth noting, require the kind of tight sourcing that would make allegations like those in Dicker's piece, particularly anonymous ones, about personal behavior hard to get into print. "

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