Politics on the Hudson

President Obama’s spokesman Bill Burton was asked this morning in Martha’s Vineyard, where the president if vacationing, about Gov. David Paterson’s recent comments that media criticism of him and the president may be race based.

Burton said the president doesn’t share Paterson’s opinion.

“In terms of media coverage and the President, he thinks that there are a lot of people who agree with him in the media, there are a lot of people who disagree with him in the media, and there’s a lot of folks who just report it straight,” Burton said, according to a transcript of the briefing.

“Whether or not race plays into that I don’t think is the case.  The president doesn’t think it’s the case.  What he thinks is that there’s a lot of people who have different opinions, and one of the great parts about the American tradition is that people are able to do that freely.  And that’s the sort of thing that makes our democracy so strong.”

In a radio interview Friday, Paterson, the state’s first African-American governor, claimed that race is playing a role in the criticism of him by the media and others.

He put out a statement later Friday to clarify his remarks, but continued to make the same claims over the weekend in an interview with the Web site The Borrero Report, which published the comments today.

In the interview, Paterson says he has taken offense to being called the accidental governor (something he has mentioned before.) He also said he thinks some people get “nervous” if too many political leaders are black.

“Part of what I feel is that one very successful minority is permissible, but when you see too many success stories then some people get nervous,” he said.

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