By Michael Meyers

One of these days Aunt Jemima will not only be slimmed down but removed entirely from the pancake box. That will most likely happen long before New York gets a smart, articulate, Ivy League-trained lawyer and African American woman elected to a statewide office, which a week ago seemed likely.

For that setback in “firsts,” blame gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer, scornfully dubbed “the smartest man” in the world by Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel for having tapped as his running mate Harlem State Senator David Paterson over Leecia Eve, the best-looking Lt. Governor hopeful to come along in decades. And blame David Paterson, who accepted Spitzer’s choice of him over Leecia Eve, whose early supporters included even David’s father, Basil.

Spitzer’s bombshell announcement has nearly destroyed Eve’s chances. Who would have thunk much less imagined that David, the son of one of Harlem’s noblest politicians, wittingly and willingly playing the role of spoiler, much less race traitor? 

And race betrayal is exactly what has happened here. Paterson would rather be a token, the “first African-American to,” even it means blocking a far-better qualified (and also black) candidate. Leecia Eve is an expert at a whole lot of high-brow stuff—election reform, immigration policy, intellectual property, securities and anti-trust law, for instance. She took her degrees from Smith College and Harvard (not Hofstra) Law School, along with a masters in Public Administration from the JFK School of Government at Harvard (not Howard). 

Eve’s been a judicial clerk, a partner at a major law firm and counsel to two U.S. Senators, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. She left Clinton’s staff in order to make the run for Lt. Governor. If Hillary had not already discredited herself at Al Sharpton’s MLK Day charade, Hillary might have rightly called Spitzer’s maneuver here (using Paterson to block Eve) “plantation politics.” For Eve is widely regarded as the closest New York comes to having our own Barack Obama. But now there is silence from Hillary and others, not wanting to offend the liberal Spitzer or exacerbate tensions of a rivalry between a black man and a better-qualified black woman for New York’s Lt. Governor.

So, Eve has been shunted aside. Spitzer wants her gone. And Paterson has no vision of upward mobility for anybody else but himself. His act of betrayal against his father’s wishes and those of the Harlem political establishment’s, and against Buffalo’s favorite African American daughter, brings to mind the imagery of crabs in a barrel, yet another old African American stereotype.

It might be different if Paterson himself impresses; he does not. He’s been the consummate politician—talking at times out of both sides of his big mouth. At one moment he was decrying the black racist Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s so-called Million Youth March in Harlem, and urging Khalid’s arrest for inciting black youths to riot; in the next, Paterson was standing hat in hand before a booing, angry audience of black militants saying that he should not have called for Muhammad’s arrest.  Maybe the aging Jewish leaders who praised his pick by Spitzer forgot that two-facedness; short-term memory goes first.

But that’s hardly Paterson’s only foray into black extremism. Lenora Fulani herself praised Paterson as the only black elected official who came to her defense when “the Jewish establishment came after me with a vengeance.” And Paterson’s been a faithful ally of the hateful Al Sharpton, who once called Jews “diamond merchants.” Paterson not only overlooked but excused Sharpton for his rhetorical excesses in the Tawana Brawley hoax (One example of Sharpton’s madness: Sharpton had claimed that having Tawana Brawley sit down with the state attorney general would be like “asking someone who watched someone killed in the gas chamber to sit down with Mr. Hitler.”) on the basis that had Rev. Al renounced Brawley, “he’d never have recovered with his base,” by which he meant the ignorant black masses, as he saw them, no doubt. And Tamar Jacoby, a former New York Times staffer, reported in City Journal how Paterson even gave cover to racial arsonist Sonny Carson (best known for his role in the boycott of the “yellow monkeys,” as his supporters termed the Korean merchants on Church Avenue in Brooklyn). According to Jacoby, Paterson explained Carson as a rhetorical “flamethrower,” adding that, “often that is what it takes to get some attention.” 

This kind of radical chic will, I suspect, incite folks in upper New York and on Long Island to mutiny against the Democratic ticket. And brainiac Spitzer will have nobody else to blame other than himself. 

Mostly, though, we must blame David Paterson, who should know better than to sideline a better-qualified African American so that he can showcase his “achievement” as the -current Minority (mind you) Leader of the State Senate, and, thus, “the highest-ranking African American elected official in New York State,” and “the first nonwhite -legislative leader in Albany’s history.” Top crab in the barrel; Paterson is running on stereotype, and if he loses, perhaps his consolation prize should be replacing his face for Aunt Jemima’s on the pancake box. 

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