Pataki is not well known outside of his home state, hasn’t held elected office in eight years, and will turn seventy this summer. And yet he seems to be genuinely considering a run. The question, as when Pataki flirted with a bid four years ago, is why. “Pataki – I’m puzzled about this,” Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told me. “I don’t even know what he’s been doing. Has he been on corporate boards?”