Given the amount of really bad news he's being hit with, Governor David Paterson must have taken comfort in The Daily Beast's piece Friday morning.

Reihan Salam's "What Paterson Got Right" reminds us that there's plenty worth praising about our governor. Despite the very serious allegations against him, wrote Salam, Paterson "might be the best governor New York has had in decades."

"If Paterson gets credit for nothing else," wrote Salam, "he deserves high praise for finally taking on New York's onerous Rockefeller drug laws, a massive jobs program for prison guards and for the economically depressed upstate towns that warehouse hundreds of thousands of people, most of them men, from inner city neighborhoods."

Salam also credits Paterson for having the rare courage to try to both rein in state spending and increase taxes. "Despite his reputation as a liberal firebrand," wrote Salam, "the governor has proved far more of a spending hawk than Pataki, who used strong revenues to permanently ratchet up spending levels, and he's proved gutsier than his predecessor Eliot Spitzer, who left office before confronting truly difficult choices."

If he stays in office, and if he sticks to his guns on spending, it's remotely possible that Paterson could muscle and shame the state legislature into passing a sensible budget and get us started on a path toward fiscal health. It's not encouraging, though, that there's apparently no movement on the budget, and the deadline's less than a month away.

And it's anybody's guess, of course, whether Paterson will complete his term. He continues to insist that he will. But his fate isn't necessarily in his own hands.