[nfbwatlk] A Blind Leader Adjusts, and So Does New York

[Lauren Merryfield]

Hi,
It is a bummer he didn't learn braille and use a white cane.  I wonder how 
people would treat him if he had learned those things?
Thanks
Lauren
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar at olypen.com>
To: "nfbw" <nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 8:41 PM
Subject: [nfbwatlk] A Blind Leader Adjusts, and So Does New York


April 21, 2008
A Blind Leader Adjusts, and So Does New York
By JEREMY W. PETERS
ALBANY — It is a phone number that just a handful of the governor’s senior 
aides know.

At the end of each day they call in and record briefings, laying out what he 
needs to know about the following day.

They recite his schedule, read talking points and explain the intricacies of 
issues likely to come up. They read memos from staff members and relate 
biographical details about the people he is likely to meet.

Lots of governors rely on thick briefing books and helpful e-mail notes from 
their staffs. New York’s governor, David A. Paterson, who is legally blind, 
has his ears and what his aides call his Batphone.

Usually at night, in the Executive Mansion or at his family’s home in 
Harlem, the governor listens to the recordings on the designated phone line. 
They run up to five minutes each and can pile up quickly, taking hours to 
absorb.

“Last night I had 43 messages, all of them five minutes in length,” Mr. 
Paterson said in an interview. “That would be 215 minutes worth of 
material — over three hours.”

He stayed up that night from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. listening to the recordings, 
which covered everything from his prepared remarks for a press conference on 
energy to articles on economic growth in The Economist. But that was only 
enough time to get through half of them.

To the general public, the transition to a governor who is legally blind has 
been almost imperceptible because Mr. Paterson, 53, acts in many ways like a 
person with 20-20 vision.

He does not walk with a cane or read Braille. He threw out the first pitch 
at a Mets game at Shea Stadium last week. And when he is in the Capitol’s 
familiar stone and marble corridors, where he has worked for two decades, he 
walks at a brisk pace, slowing down only when an aide alerts him to someone 
approaching.

But behind the scenes, Albany is a different place since Mr. Paterson was 
sworn in last month. With a blind man in charge — the governor can see 
nothing out of his left eye and only color and large objects out of his 
right — everything from speech preparation to the instructions for the staff 
at the governor’s mansion has been custom-fitted to Mr. Paterson’s needs.

“Now that he’s governor, it’s a whole new ball game,” said Assemblyman Keith 
L. T. Wright of Harlem, who has known Mr. Paterson since they were boys.

Since he cannot read from a prompter, the governor tries to commit his 
speeches to memory, by listening several times to an aide’s recording of the 
speech. Delivering an address just from memory can be nerve-racking.

“It’s like a high wire,” he said. “You trip, there’s no net.”

He travels with a phalanx of assistants, typically a half-dozen, including 
aides and bodyguards, who act as a buffer zone around him in large public 
settings, from hotel ballrooms to school classrooms. The bodyguards gently 
steer him, often with a hand on his back or arm, toward an exit or into a 
waiting vehicle.

At news conferences in the Capitol’s ceremonial Red Room, it is not the 
governor but his press secretary, standing just to the side of the lectern, 
who calls on reporters, reminding them to state their names and affiliations 
before asking a question.

Glad-handing a crowd poses a challenge for Mr. Paterson because he cannot 
fully make out people as they approach him. So when his aides spot someone 
they recognize coming toward him, they tell him who it is. He instructs the 
aides not to whisper, but to speak in their normal tone of voice, because he 
wants the exchanges to appear as ordinary as possible.

Mr. Paterson, a Harlem Democrat who has been blind since infancy, has been 
making adjustments to his surroundings throughout his life. But, with the 
added demands of the job of governor and the relentlessness of his new 
schedule, staying on top of his work now takes a lot more time. He said much 
of his day can feel like a big game of catch-up. “I’m always trying to get 
back that time that I’m losing,” he said.

Given the volume of material he must take in, he tries to find ways to do 
things faster. He listens to very long articles or books on a special tape 
recorder for the blind that plays at speeds so fast, it is difficult for 
others to comprehend. “You get used to listening to that Alvin and the 
Chipmunks voice,” he said.

At the Executive Mansion, staff members have been trying to keep up with the 
needs of their new boss. They were instructed shortly after he moved in last 
month to watch the level of his drink during receptions and offer him a 
refill if it looked too low. He was still learning the layout of the house 
and could not find the bar easily.

Mr. Paterson has told the staff not to move any of the furniture in the 
40-plus-room home on his account, and has said that he will learn where 
everything is.

He is used to adapting, in big and small ways. When he wants more salt on 
his food, he takes the shaker and sprinkles its contents into his hand first 
so he can feel whether he actually has the salt, and not the pepper, which 
is less chunky to the touch. When he jogs through his former neighborhood in 
Guilderland, near Albany, he runs the same route each time. He purposely 
avoids Route 146 because of the gullies that run along the side of the road.

“The secret is how to adjust,” he said. “I ask myself how am I going to fit 
into this world, and how am I going to do it without killing myself.”

As a baby, he suffered from a condition known as optic atrophy, which 
damages the optic nerve. His parents decided not to send him to school in 
New York City, where teachers could not promise that he would be able to 
interact with students who were not blind. So they sent him to school on 
Long Island, where he received special attention but also learned with 
students who were not disabled.

The minimal sight in his right eye — in which his vision is 20/400 — affords 
him a limited ability to read. If he holds a book very close to his eye, he 
can make out the words. And he said he will occasionally write himself 
reminder notes. But reading is so straining that it tires him after only a 
few minutes.

His reliance on his hearing has helped him sharpen a talent useful in 
politics: an ability to focus on people in a way that makes them feel that 
they were truly heard. His attentiveness to people’s voices has other 
political benefits, too.

“He can pick up a phony faster than somebody who has sight,” said 
Assemblyman Wright.

He also uses humor to poke fun at his disability, offering anecdotes about 
how he once showed up at a press conference wearing two different-colored 
shoes, or how as a young man he would occasionally miscount the number of 
subway stops on his way home and get off at 145th Street instead of 135th 
Street. “Back in the ’80s, you didn’t want to go there at night,” he said, 
laughing.

Although Mr. Paterson often says he does not want people to go out of their 
way for him, he says society should recognize that he and other blind people 
cannot do everything on their own.

As one of his first acts as governor, he added instructions to his official 
state Web site on how to enlarge the type on the screen.

“It’s just being more sensitive to people who feel that government and 
institutions ignore them,” he said.


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