Updated 01/07/2009 07:47 AM
Gov. Paterson prepares for State of the State address
It's a year of firsts for Governor Paterson as he prepares to give his State of the State speech. Not only is he the state's first African American governor, he's also the first legally blind governor. Paterson will memorize his speech. Our Erin Billups talked with a senior aide to the Governor to get a sense of how he does it.ALBANY, N.Y. --As Capitol staff put the last-minute touches in the Assembly chamber for the state of the state address, Governor Paterson also used the day for last-minute preparations.
Unlike past governors, Paterson has no need for a teleprompter. He's legally blind and doesn't read brail, so he'll memorize his entire speech, which will be between 30 and 40 minutes long.
"It takes approximately one hour for him to memorize every minute of material. So if his speech is 45 minutes, he needs approximately 45 hours," said Dr. Jon Cohen, Paterson's senior advisor.
His staff records the speech into a special dictation system to help him memorize it.
Cohen said, "He likes to refer to it frequently as the bat phone. In this case we will dictate the speech, it usually goes in, in several segments, and he will listen to it until he has committed it to memory."
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Cohen said the State of the State speech alone is six months in the making - a process in which Paterson is very involved.
"I view him as in some sense, really not being disabled at all because he functions above levels that most of us usually function at on a day to day level," said Cohen.
Agency heads, advocacy groups and industry leaders submit ideas that are filtered through a process of elimination - first narrowed to 200 proposals, then down to 100.
Cohen said, "We then took those 100 ideas and proposals and brought them to budget and legal to look and see which ones were legally possible to do, then we brought it to budget to see how much they would cost."
About 500 to 1,000 people are expected to attend the state of the state address. But there's less anticipation this year surrounding what Paterson will talk about seeing as though he's already released his executive budget proposal. Still, Cohen said Paterson has more up his sleeve.
He said, "There will be surprises, absolutely. From the budget you can imply where all of the funding will be, but that doesn't tell you exactly what his priorities are."
Cohen said up until now, the governor has mainly focused on the fiscal crisis he inherited when he unexpectedly took the governorship.
"This is the first time that he really has an opportunity to speak of his bigger vision for New York and address specific areas about where we want to go in the specific policy areas, so for him it's a very different speech," said Cohen.
Paterson plans to follow up his State of the State address with upstate tour of town hall meetings, instead of the “State of Upstate”.
Tune in for live coverage of the speech from our Capital Tonight team starting at 1 p.m. We will also provide a link to a live stream.