A hospital trade group and a health-care union yesterday released a bizarre new attack ad – using a sightless man wearing sunglasses to slam legally blind Gov. Paterson for budget cuts.
“Why are you doing this to me?” the patient asks Paterson halfway through the 30-second spot, funded to the tune of $1 million a week by the Greater New York Hospital Association and Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union.
To some observers, the blind man’s role in the statewide attack ad against Paterson’s plan to cut health care by $3.5 billion seems too personal by even Albany’s standards for no-holds-barred budget battles.
The man identified himself today as Juan Pietri and issued a statement saying he volunteered to appear in the ad because he is “deeply concerned that the governor’s health care cuts would threaten my access to [medical] services, which I desperately need to survive.”
Pietri went on to say he wasn’t trying to call attention to Paterson’s blindness.
“I am no different from the millions of other New Yorkers who want to see health care protected from budget cuts.”
Paterson said Pietri’s participation in the ad did not bother him.
“I don’t think it’s below the belt,” said Paterson, who has seen only shapes and shadows since he was stricken with an eye infection as an infant. “They’re just trying to make the point that there are a number of people who are going to be impacted based on the cuts. I have absolutely no problem with their ads.”
The governor’s soft talk, however, contradicted his administration’s effort to fight back.
Paterson had barely finished talking with reporters in Manhattan when three of his top aides appeared at a news conference in Albany to slam the ads as “yet another page from the tired political playbook of scare-tactic rhetoric.”
When asked whether they saw the use of a blind man as a personal attack on the governor, Health Commissioner Dr. Richard Daines went biblical.
“I don’t think they’d be so crass as to select that,” the former Mormon missionary said.
“There’s a passage in Jeremiah that says something like, ‘Foolish people even having eyes do not see.’ And I think we’re really concerned about people who have the eyes to see the problems and aren’t choosing to see them.”
Former Govs. George Pataki and Eliot Spitzer both endured a relentless pounding from similar ads after proposing steep health-care cuts.
Spitzer used his own war chest to fund an advertising counterattack, a step which Paterson has said he doesn’t plan to take.
Officials for SEIU 1199 and GNYHA refused to identify any of the 10 patients, nurses and health aides featured in the ad.
They said that the individuals were “real people” selected from local hospitals and community groups and that none was paid for participating.
GNYHA President Kenneth Raske said that the group launched the campaign against Paterson, a former ally, with “a heavy heart” and that the attacks were not intended to be personal.
“We have our back against the wall in this process,” Raske said.
“We have institutions that are right now hemorrhaging. Some are on the borderline of closure. This is the last thing that us and the union want to do.”