TodayA fast climb, faster fall for Gov. Spitzer
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Article RatingElliot Spitzer, the now-disgraced outgoing governor of New York, isn’t the first person to fail to live up to his own public standards.
What was remarkable about Spitzer is how high he had set those standards. As a prosecutor and later the attorney general of New York, he went after corruption in government as well as in the private sector. He was best known for holding the solons of Wall Street responsible for their extra-legal shenanigans, earning the nickname “Elliot Ness” for his hard-nosed approach to white-collar crime in the investment capital of the world.
Along the way, he had broken up a few prostitution rings as well.
His achievements in law enforcement earned him the cover of Time magazine among other accolades and made him a shoo-in when the governor’s office became open in 2006. Indeed, he was elected by one of the highest margins in the state’s history.
That was 14 months ago. Today he’s cleaning out his office in preparation for an exit Monday from public life because his appetite for high-priced prostitutes became public.
This is all joyful fodder for late-night comics and bloggers, but for the rest of us, it’s just one more reason to be cynical about government and the people who choose to work there.
Nevertheless, the story will live on for several more days as people attempt to make sense of what happened. We wish them luck, because there’s not much logic in this situation.
Spitzer was an expert in tracking down malefactors in high finance. This is difficult work requiring specialized knowledge, and even if he relied on support from experts in the field, he surely retained some knowledge as he took these cases to court.
He must have known that banks are required to report large movements of cash to the IRS, and yet he made such transactions himself to pay high-priced prostitutes. Having broken up rings of such lawbreakers in the past, he had to be aware of the methods law enforcement used to track these rings.
And yet he forged ahead, only to be caught in the most public of ways.
Although he stalled for a couple of days, he finally did the right thing and stepped down yesterday. Lawmakers simply can’t be lawbreakers. We remain open to the possibility that someone who has done so much good in the past can be rehabilitated, but it’s probably better that it doesn’t take place in the political realm.
