The coveted SF endorsement

So there's apparently a good chance that, when Hillary resigns her seat post-inauguration, Gov. David Paterson will select my congresswoman, Nydia Velazquez, to fill her Senate seat and I'm hoping that he does so.

For one thing, she's clearly a twofer on the identity politics front, which is the cause of most of my optimism and some of my enthusiasm for her selection. But since she's been my representative I've checked to make sure she votes the right way on important stuff and sure enough, she has. It reminds me of an Alec Baldwin line from 30 Rock, where he's talking to the young white male NBC page Kenneth and informs him that, politically speaking, he's actually a latina woman. That's me.

My only beef with Rep. Velazquez was that she, along with I believe every other New York politician, supported Clinton in the primary. (I wrote her a letter sometime after Super Tuesday urging her to abandon ship and throw her support to Obama, but she took no heed.) And she also was a bit of a villain in David Einhorn's book, having failed to do anything as chair of the Small Business Committee over the utterly corrupt Small Business Administration (which pretty clearly falls in her purview), even after he made his case to her staff.

But on the whole, good peoples. And all the alternatives are either unknown or annoying. Andrew Cuomo? No gracias.

BTW the place to go for the latest on all the Paterson-stalking and nomination-jockeying is Elizabeth Benjamin's blog, which is the rookie of the year in my RSS reader.