Sure, they were running mates. Sure, both are Democrats. Sure, they worked mostly in tandem as governor and lieutenant governor.
But it would be hard to find men with more different personal styles than Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson. It is a contrast that goes deeper than obvious facts of race and disability.
Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president who was the party's 2005 candidate for New York City mayor, knows them both.
"Monday night, I said a prayer for two guys who are friends of mine," said Ferrer, now in private life. "Both are blazingly smart, in different ways. One is impulsive, the other is thoughtful."
Paterson, says Ferrer, is "thoughtful and deliberate, and thinks things out a number of steps." As for advice, Ferrer adds, "the thing he will need to do - and it's easy to say now that I'm out of politics - is curb his natural tendency to be witty."
Say what you will now that he's done, but nobody ever accused Spitzer of being a schmoozer or a raconteur. The Albany crowd knows that in private.....
Dan Janison
.....Paterson will tell a long howler of a story with himself or his visual impairment as the butt of the joke. There was one he told many years ago of how in his youth he got in a dispute with his date - who in turn got angry and sent him "home" on the wrong subway train.
Spitzer went from a prosecutor's role to the Capitol's executive chamber - a fact that drove the irony of his political demise. Paterson, however, came up as a legislator, paid some dues, and ended up leading a rebellion among Senate Democrats that made him the state's first African-American head of a party conference, the minority leader.
Republicans know their differences well. At the Capitol yesterday, state Sen. Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) underscored his concerns about how Paterson sponsored legislation two years ago that would have required police officers to shoot to harm, not to kill. He warned Paterson might be more New York City-centric than his predecessor.
Still, Skelos termed Paterson a "gentleman" with whom he was optimistic the GOP majority could work - something he wasn't saying about Spitzer since Albany's partisan wars began last year.
Both Spitzer and Paterson were Ivy Leaguers and lawyers and, in different ways, in the ranks of the privileged. But Spitzer's father Bernard was a real estate mogul, while Basil Paterson, former New York secretary of state, was a Harlem lawyer and political figure and one-time candidate for lieutenant governor.
Last September, Paterson raised eyebrows of his own amid the uproar over Spitzer's license plan for illegal immigrants. He noted to a crowd at the West Indian-American Day parade in Brooklyn that noncitizen permanent residents used to be able to vote in the United States. Later a Spitzer spokeswoman said Paterson had just been giving "historical perspective," not signaling a change in policy.
For the Capitol crew, it looks like a change of lifestyle - the transition from the outsider zealot to the insider negotiator.
"One guy will drink with you, the other won't," an Albany insider said of Paterson and Spitzer, respectively. "Paterson understands people, understands the roles we all play. The other guy said, 'Don't touch.'"
In the weeks ahead, with a crisis budget in the works, we'll get to see just what difference Paterson's style will make. And, whether even the pretense of systemic reform lives or dies with this regime change.