YNN’s Mike Whittemore, who is still in San Juan covering the tail end of the Somos winter conference, sent this photo of Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo having a tete-a-tete (literally) with his predecessor, Gov. David Paterson.

Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, who chairs the Hispanic Task Force that is hosting Somos, is angling to orchestrate a private get-together with the incoming and outgoing governors, who spoke at length after Cuomo’s election last week. No word on whether that’s going to happen.

I believe this is the first time the two have seen each other face-to-face since the election. I’m not sure when the last time they actually sat down together was.

Paterson and Cuomo once appeared to be headed for a major political collision. Paterson, New York’s first black governor, insisted he planned to run this fall for the office he had inherited from disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, in spite of his historically low poll numbers, faltering fundraising and loss of support from the Obama administration.

There was considerable speculation about whether Cuomo would primary Paterson, particularly in light of his disastrous 2002 primary challenge to the state’s first black major party gubernatorial nominee, then-state Comptroller H. Carl McCall.

Of course, the twin scandals of David Johnson’s domestic violence case and the Yankees World Series tickets ended up forcing Paterson to give up on his campaign less than a week after he launched it. Cuomo initially launched investigations into both scandals, but handed them off to former Chief Judge Judith Kaye after his own poll numbers dipped.

Kaye found the Paterson administration had serious “errors of judgement” in handling the Johnson mess, but nothing rose to the level of criminality. She referred the Yankees tickets case to the Albany County DA, and we’re still waiting to see where that goes.

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