It's Not Patterson's Blindness That Explains his Failures as Governor

Here's a headline that I would have hoped never to encounter:  "Paterson's sight hurting job."

The article that follows, which can be found at http://www.silive.com/news/advance/index.ssf?/base/news/1250927108150700.xml&coll=1

details New York Governor, David Patterson's abysmally low state-wide approval rating and decries his alleged ineptitude as New York's governor, and, here's the major problem I have with the article's allegations, ties Patterson's shortcomings to his visual impairment.  With headlines like this, it's no wonder that the unemployment rate for people who are blind exceeds 70 percent!  With attitudes like this, so blatantly and unapologetically stated by NY state Sen. Diane Savino who is liberally quoted in the article, it's a wonder that any of us who are blind and visually impaired ever even makes it to the initial job interview phase of our quest for employment!

I am far from qualified to dispute Ms. Savino's assessment of Patterson's record as governor.  I don't live in or even near New York; I don't often follow politics in the Empire State, although I did find recent published descriptions of the behavior of various New York State legislators pretty unbelievable and I was grateful that it wasn't Democrats or Republicans in my own state house in Annapolis locking one another out and generally behaving like summer campers involved in some color war gone terribly awry. I was not favorably impressed by the nastiness that Patterson exhibited  toward Caroline Kennedy when he had the opportunity to appoint a Senator to fill Hillary Clinton's vacated Senate seat, and, from time to time, I have read other statements released by Patterson or his office that made me wonder just how well qualified this man is to govern an important state like New York.  Suffice it to say that I have not been very favorably impressed by his leadership skills - Does he have any? - or his petulant remarks - He seems to make a lot of those.  If I were a New Yorker, I would hope, along with  State Senator Savino, that he can be persuaded not to run for another term, because it would be hard for me to vote for him.

But, to connect his low approval ratings and his alleged ineptitude with his disability, this kind of correlation is false and stating it so blatantly can have disastrous consequences for all of us who are blind, visually impaired, and disabled, especially since so many people with disabilities, particularly those who are blind and visually impaired, were so celebratory of Patterson's ascendancy to the position of governor, simply because he is blind.  (Let us hope that disability advocates have learned some lessons about making assumptions, good or bad, about what a person's disability, in itself, might, or might not, portend about his ability to do a job.) 

Ms. Savino points out that Patterson cannot read print.  She says that he relies on his staff, not only for reading newspapers, reports, and other printed materials aloud, but for their summaries of various reports and their advice as well.  Lots of politicians rely on staff members, whom they have chosen after all, for help and advice, but Savino implies that Patterson's inability to read print independently makes it impossible for him to gather the information he needs for making good decisions.  She says that he cannot rely on the e-mails and Blackberry communications that people who are sighted take for granted, and that, since he doesn't know braille, he can't keep track of the information he requires without having to rely exclusively on memorization.

These claims tell us more about the state senator's lack of familiarity with blindness and with people who are blind than they tell us about the governor's short-comings.  If Patterson is inept, if he seems sometimes to be detached from reality, if his decision-making skills are poor and he relies too heavily on staff and not enough on becoming well informed himself, then these shortcomings are the fault of the person, David Patterson.  They have nothing to do with his blindness, and to claim that they do sends a very derogatory message about the rest of us who are blind.  There are all kinds of tools that Patterson can utilize for doing his job; if he isn't taking advantage of these tools, or he doesn't know how to do so, his blindness is not the thing that is preventing him from governing effectively.

Screen readers, software which reads aloud the content on a computer screen, have been around since the days of DOS.  If Patterson does not use screen readers for e-mail, word processing, surfing the internet and reading documents, then it is the fact that he doesn't take advantage of this very powerful tool that puts him at a disadvantage, not his blindness!

Savino assumes that reading by listening is so time-consuming that the governor cannot possibly keep up with the amount of reading he needs to do, but this claim, too, is without merit.  All spoken digital content can be sped up to unbelievably rapid levels.  I know many people who listen to speech content so rapid that the Chipmunks, by comparison, sound like they have a Southern drawl.  One can read every major newspaper as DAISY content or via Audible.com subscriptions, by downloading files from BookShare, or directly from publication web sites, and scanners and text-to-speech capabilities from Kurzweil, Open Book, and now e-book readers like Amazon.com's Kindle are making options for reading via listening so commonplace as to be taken for granted.  And, people who have print disabilities also have all of the dial-in newspaper reading options that are accessible via services like the NFB NewsLine and the Metropolitan Washington Ear and various radio-reading and dial-in news organizations all over the country.  Humanware is about to release an accessible Blackberry, and the Iphone, which is accessible via Apple's built-in screen reading technology is high on my own personal technology wish list.  Patterson may not avail himself of these technologies, or he may not have taken the time to learn to use them, but if that is the case, it is not his blindness that keeps him from accessing e-mail, internet content, and media independently.

 Many of us who, like Patterson, grew up with low vision did not learn to read and write in braille.  Fortunately, there are now laws, including IDEA and various "Braille Bills" that have passed in many states that mandate the teaching of braille to legally blind children in today's public school classrooms, and, hopefully, the number of blind and visually impaired people who know braille will increase over time.  That said, however, there is nothing to prevent the governor from learning or using braille even though he didn't learn to read and write with the code went he was six.  I didn't learn braille until I was the mother of six and well beyond first grade.  The agency that provides vocational rehabilitation services to the citizens of New York State can provide a braille teacher for the governor, or he can learn braille, on his own, via the excellent distance education courses that the Hadley School for the Blind makes available free of charge.  He can check out the braille teaching materials available, again, free of charge, from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS).  Or he can continue to decline to learn braille and employ other efficient methods for reading, writing, and keeping track of information, including using digital recorders, leaving himself messages on his telephone answering machine, or asking an assistant to take notes for him and make them available upon request.  To claim that the Governor's ignorance of the braille code keeps him from being an effective governor is simply untrue!

Anyone in political life is, unavoidably, open to criticism, and Patterson is certainly no exception.  But, I urge his critics to evaluate his performance as governor without attributing his failures to his disability. Just as it was unwise for some disability advocates to assume that Patterson's disability would make him a more compassionate or empathetic or friendly to other people with disabilities governor than someone without a disability might be, it is equally wrong, when his performance is found to be lacking to attribute his low approval ratings and his mistakes to his blindness.  It is insulting to those of us who are blind to attribute David Patterson's failures as governor to his inability to see.  The state senator acknowledges that an economy in free fall and a legislature's apparent revolt against itself have hindered Patterson's ability to govern.  Neither of these circumstances has anything to do with his disability.  She also claims to be supportive of him (in the moment) as the only governor New York State currently has, and to find him likeable and, in many ways, brilliant.  Neither of these more positive appraisals has anything to do with his blindness either.

David Patterson's blindness should be thought of as neutral, having nothing to do with his successes as governor or with his perceived failures.  I hope that State Senator Savino will re-evaluate her analysis of the governor's short-comings and leave his disability of blindness out of the evaluation criteria she chooses to use.