Paterson's Paranoia
I am known as New York's accidental governor.
I would like to point out a couple of facts. The two adjoining states to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, have had three government changes in the last five years. None of those people were called the accidental governor. ... Nobody called Teddy Roosevelt an accidental president. Nobody called Truman an accidental president. And nobody called LBJ an accidental anything.
So why was this non-illustrious title held all of these years for me?
I will leave the answer to all of you and the Freudians in the audience because I haven't had the chance to think about it.
-- Governor Paterson, address to the NAACP, July 17, 2008
Indeed, Mr. Paterson must not have had a chance to think about it. If he had, a person of his intelligence would have realized that rather than reserving the title of accidental governor for an African American, as was Mr. Paterson's clear implication, Americans have used the term widely to apply to politicians who took office when misfortune befell their predecessors. A quick check of Amazon.com — maybe Mr. Paterson just sees the Web site as a cow to milk for sales tax revenues rather than as a source of useful information — discloses that entire books have been written naming no less than four white Americans as accidental presidents.
The first of them was Robert Sherrill's 1967 book about Lyndon Johnson, "The Accidental President," putting the lie to Mr. Paterson's claim that "nobody called LBJ an accidental anything." There is a 2001 book about President Bush titled "The Accidental President: How 413 Lawyers, 9 Supreme Court Justices, and 5,963,110 Floridians (Give or Take a Few) Landed George W. Bush in the White House." There is a 2006 biography of our 10th president titled "John Tyler, The Accidental President." The White House Web site says Tyler's detractors called the first vice president to take over after the death of a president "his accidency." And there is a 2008 biography of President Ford titled "Gerald Ford — The Accidental President."
Contrary to Mr. Paterson's claim that "nobody called Truman an accidental president," David McCullough's best-selling biography includes a sentence that after a mid-term election, "Harry Truman, the 'accidental' President, was now also a 'minority' President." As for Theodore Roosevelt, the director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center Initiative at Dickinson State University has written that "Roosevelt was an accidental president in two senses," and quotes Roosevelt himself as saying after winning election in his own right in 1904 after serving out McKinley's term, "I am no longer a political accident."
As for the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut, our search found dozens of stories describing the Garden State's Governor Codey as an accidental governor. A January 11, 2006, editorial in the Star-Ledger of Newark began: "Richard Codey is often called the accidental governor because he was in the right place — the Senate president's office — when former Gov. James McGreevey stunned the state and nation by announcing he was resigning because he had an extramarital affair with a man." The Bergen Record, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post, and the New York Observer all called Mr. Codey the accidental governor. In Connecticut, Governor Rell, who took over after the resignation of Governor Rowland, was described as "accidental governor" repeatedly by the New York Times and the Hartford Courant. Had Mr. Paterson known of it, maybe he'd chalk it up to sexism.
Indeed, the real question isn't why Mr. Paterson is described as an accidental governor. The real question is why he perceives it, in spite of the ample evidence to the contrary, as being singled out for a racial slight. It suggests to us a certain insecurity, even paranoia, on the governor's part. The way for him to allay it would not be to give an out of state speech implying that the citizens of New York are a bunch of racists, but rather to do as Roosevelt and Ms. Rell did — build a record on which to win re-election.
