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a blogumn by Monique King-Viehland

One of the continuous arguments that we heard against Sarah Palin during the recent presidential campaign was that she was not qualified to be Vice President let alone President. The real fear being that if something happened to John McCain, Would Palin have effectively run the country. In fact when asked the question in a 2008 PBS.Org poll, 95% of respondents answered “No.” Moreover, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted in October 2009, 71% of respondents “did not think she was qualified to sit in the Oval Office.”
At the end of the day, that is a real issue. Whoever sits in the “Number 2” chair can end up becoming “Number 1.” The second string, if you will, needs to be up to the job. So this begs the question, what were the Democrats thinking when Paterson was selected by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer as his running mate for the Governor’s office in 2006?
I mean don’t get me wrong, Paterson had a strong political heritage and background.
The son of Basil Paterson, who was the first non-white secretary of state of New York, the first African-American vice-chair of the national Democratic Party, the first African-American NYC Deputy Mayor and the first African-American to run for statewide office in New York, Paterson was destined to be a rising star in New York politics. And he quickly followed in his father’s footsteps.
According to Wikipedia, “in 1985 Paterson won a highly competitive New York (Manhattan) County Democratic party Committee selection process to serve the rest of the term of longtime state Senator Leon Bogues, who had died. The following year, he won the seat for his first full term, representing the 29th District in the New York State Senate (Harlem) – the same seat occupied by his father.” And in 2002, “Paterson was elected minority leader of the New York Senate, making him the first non-white legislative leader in New York’s history. In 2004 in Boston, he became the first visually impaired person to address a Democratic National Convention.”
In 2006, according to a New York Times article, Paterson was “respected and popular in the Democratic party, and [was] widely regarded as a smart political tactician who helped Democrats pick up seats in the New York State Senate in the 2002 elections.”
Spitzer and Paterson were elected in November 2006 with 69% of the vote. And when Spitzer resigned in the wake of a prostitution scandal, Paterson became New York State’s first African-American Governor.
So what happened?
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