ALBANY – Gov. Paterson will not appoint himself New York’s new senator if Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes Barack Obama’s secretary of state, The Post has learned.
Paterson told friends over the weekend that he wants to remain as governor, despite the state’s worsening financial situation and a recalcitrant Legislature, and plans to seek election in 2010 to the job he took over in March when Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace.
“The governor has a sense that he has been chosen to help out the state at a time of crisis and doesn’t want be seen as running away from the problem,” said one longtime Paterson acquaintance.
State law gives the governor the sole right to fill Senate vacancies. Insiders familiar with the governor’s thinking say that if Sen. Clinton gives up her Senate seat, he’d consider Attorney General Andrew Cuomo or a prominent Hispanic or upstate elected official, two groups not now represented in statewide office.
Sources close to Cuomo said he’s disinclined to accept the Senate appointment should it be offered, although they added that the first-term attorney general has yet to make a final decision.
Cuomo, who ran for governor in 2002 before dropping out to allow former Comptroller Carl McCall to snare the party’s nomination, remains a potential Democratic adversary to Paterson in the 2010 campaign.
Another leading contender for the seat is Rep. Nydia Velazquez, a Brooklyn Democrat. Naming Velazquez to the statewide post would allow Paterson to shore up his support with Latino and female voters.
Velazquez was the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, and she has served there since 1993, representing a district that includes parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan.
Rep. José Serrano, a long-serving Democrat from The Bronx, while under consideration, may be far too left of center politically to be a viable choice to replace Clinton.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who once served alongside Paterson in the state Senate, is another name in the mix. But observers say it would be a tough choice for Paterson to name a black successor to Clinton when the governor and likely the state Senate majority leader will be African-Americans.
Other candidates are Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey, Steven Israel and Jerrold Nadler.