Seth Perlman/AP
Rod Blagojevich is a persona non grata just about everywhere these days (federal penitentiary notwithstanding), but New York Gov. David Paterson might want to take a page from his Illinois colleague’s book. “What if Gov. Paterson,” Hendrik Hertzberg asks in this week’s New Yorker, “prompted by the squalor of his Illinois colleague’s maneuverings, were to put aside mundane calculations and take full advantage of his theoretically unfettered freedom of choice?” So far, the list of candidates “is as strikingly unimaginative as if the choice were being made in the usual way—i.e., by the people, as mediated through and manipulated by party primaries, fundraising prowess, non-stop polling, ethnic entitlement, and regional balancing.” Hertzberg has a list of suggestions, including Lou Reed, Paul Krugman, and Joe Torre (“No one who ever spent the equivalent of two Senate terms in a complex, ceaselessly scrutinized job in New York has ever done it better than Joe Torre did as manager of the Yankees”). “All fantasy, of course,” Hertzberg writes. “But not so fantastical as Rod Blagojevich’s notion that a seat in the United States Senate was his for the selling.”