Paterson has a sense of humor

Hat tip to JTA. Here's an interesting excerpt from David Paterson's speech to Hadassah at their convention in July 2007:

Now. When I came in this evening, Carol thanked me for coming here this evening and said ‘I understand you cut your vacation short just to be here.’ And many of you might think that that was a real act of some kind of charity, it really wasn’t. You don’t understand. Lieutenant Governors never get invited to such national prestigious organizations as this. And as soon as I heard that, I was out of the Hamptons faster than Jon Corzine I was here immediately.

So. Very few people in this room even knows what the Lieutenant Governor does, and I wish I was one of them. After six months and 15 days I’ve come to this conclusion. You wake up at 6:30 in the morning and you call the governor’s mansion. If he answers, you can go back to sleep.

Many will come before you this week telling you how glad they are to be here but you know that I really am. As a matter of fact, I found out in my third month of duty that they actually have an organization known as the National Lieutenant Governor’s Association. We had a meeting in Washington DC. And I hesitated about going to a meeting with people who must have such morbid fantasies involving plane crashes and criminal convictions. Let me just share with you that before every meeting of the National Lieutenant Governor’s Association, that we have a moment of silence, not for previous lieutenant governors who have gone on to their reward, but to demonstrate to us our true role in government.