All it took was a scandal for David Paterson to acknowledge the fact that he had about a 5% chance of re-election. Beyond that scant chance of re-election pre-scandal, David Paterson consistently wanted to fight the Chi-town Crew as though he had the institutional and media clout to tangle with the POTUS — much less lessor advisers on the Whitehouse Staff.

David Paterson simply was unable to find his own unique identity as New York Governor, and never able to establish a reliable media routine. Granted, New York is absolutely in turmoil, and in some ways Eliot Spitzer lucked out immensely. Spitzer avoided his staff’s creepy staling of opposition leaders, and dealing with the inevitable fall-out from economic difficulty.

Interestingly, here is Al Sharpton’s tweet from a meeting last night with Governor David Paterson, were Sharpton alludes to Paterson dropping out of the NY Gov race:

[...]

Today MSNBC.com has a feature that

President Barack Obama and three prominent African-American leaders grappled Wednesday with how to improve economic opportunities for blacks, whose joblessness looms well above the national average and is nearly twice that of whites. MSNBC.com

I absolutely believe that Black unemployment is definitely an issue during contractionary periods — in fact historically you can see trendlines where you have blacks (on bottom– the highest rates), Latinos (in the middle), and whites (the lowest rates) that are basically strongly correlated in movements as unemployment rates move up and down.

So, as a vital constituency of the Democratic Party, I can understand a meeting of African-American “leaders” with the Whitehouse to state their claims.  However, given this list of titular leaders (given all the organizations distributed nature) of organizations…

Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP; Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League; and the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network. Dorothy Height, chairwoman of the National Council of Negro Women…

I apologize in advance, but I don’t see what the National Action Network does other than provide Sharpton with a job in between his runs at political office.  I don’t see anything wrong with running political action groups and other organizations on private funds that are used to promote individuals a lot of politicians do this, I just have a problem when you call folks leaders when they have no real political base.  Further, if you look at National Action Network you see that Sharpton’s picture is everywhere as opposed to the people who NAN .net is actually supposed to support.

Seriously, every single picture on the NAN (.net) website as of 2/10/2010 has Sharpton in it.  20+ Pictures!