On Monday, David Paterson, the former governor of New York and one-time chair of the state's Democratic Party, convened a group of "New York political leaders and stakeholders" in front of a Midtown office building to speak about why they're refusing to support the Democratic candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and to share their proposal on how to defeat him: by choosing just one fearless leader to take him down in November, which would restore some sanity and free market principles to the election, no matter what the city's Democratic voters think.
"What I'm trying to focus on today," said Paterson, "is who will emerge from that group to lead the City," referring to all the independent candidates—Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, and Jim Walden. He praised both the records of Adams and Cuomo, but also mentioned that "there are always candidates who don't have that history who are still running in the race." With the latter, he was likely referring to his former boss Walden, whose campaign Paterson advised until he was seemingly fired after being quoted badmouthing Walden in Politico.
As to who that fearless leader will be? No one at the presser could say.
Paterson was the main event, but the man behind this press conference was the very same who organized last Monday's "worker-led protest" against Mamdani: an increasingly irate John Catsimatidis, owner of the Gristedes chain of supermarkets, who hovered over Paterson's shoulder as he spoke. I should have suspected as much, given that the location for the press conference was directly in front of Gristedes's corporate headquarters (which Catsimatidis told me last week would be no more if Mamdani becomes mayor).
This week's press conference had a better turnout—twice as many cameras and reporters, all getting increasingly impatient for some sort of resolution from the "vote-blue-no-matter-who-except-if-it's-a-socialist-Muslim-then-we'll-figure-something-else-out" wing of the Democratic establishment.