Gov. David A. Paterson this morning told a national television audience that he is in it to stay for the 2010 campaign, defying President Obama’s urging that he not run next year.

“You don’t give up because you have low poll numbers. You don’t give up because everybody’s telling you what the future is,” Paterson said on NBC’s Meet the Press today.

While some Democrats in New York last week were privately hoping Paterson would use the television interview today to back off from running, the governor said Obama never told him directly he should not run. Pressed by moderator David Gregory about conversations the governor had two weeks ago with a White House political operative urging him not to run, Paterson says he “can’t say” whether the president wants him to run or not.

“I’m blind, but I’m not oblivious,” Paterson said, alluding to his vision problems. “I know there are people who don’t want me to run.”

But the governor said the decision is not a White House one. “I think that the people of the state of New York are the ones who should choose their governor,” Paterson said.

The governor, known for going off script on occasion, kept with the mantra he has been repeating for the past several days: The polls are bad, but he believes he can turn them around and he is not thinking about abandoning the 2010 campaign.

“The White House has a country to run and I have a state to run, and there’s politics to go on all the time,” Paterson said. But, he added, “I’ve never gotten an explicit indication authorized from the White House that I shouldn’t run.”

The White House political director, Patrick Gaspard, met with Paterson two weeks ago in Manhattan in a meeting in which the governor heard that Obama had lost confidence in his ability to get elected next year. The president last week traveled to an Albany-area college where he sent several obvious signals that he and Paterson were far from the best of political allies.

“They certainly sent a message that they have concerns,” Paterson said of the White House.

But, he said, governors across the country are in political difficulty because of having to make hard fiscal decisions during the recession. He stepped up his campaign of insisting that New York has fared better than other states, some of which have deeply cut education programs, laid off state workers or released inmates from state prisons to save cash.

The governor brushed aside a question on whether he thought it was wrong for Obama to get involved in New York politics, but noted a Marist College poll that last week showed most New York voters think the president over-extended his reach.

“I’m not going to say I haven’t had a difficult week,” Paterson said, but added that many New Yorkers have had a far more difficult week coping with the recession.

“You don’t give up because everybody’s telling you what the future is,” he added.

(Source: Buffalow News)