Spitzer’s collapse that preceded his ruin

There is in the New York Times a revealing profile of Eliot Spitzer’s increasingly troubled reign and troubled mind as governor of New York in the months before his fall. The particular thought I derive from the piece is that it was Troopergate—his use of state police to gather damaging information on his main political rival Joseph Bruno—that brought him down. Once that scandal broke last July, Spitzer never had an adequate and truthful response to the questions about his own involvement in it, and was in a steady cover-up mode. Yet the media, especially the New York Post (which despite its utter corruption and hypocrisy has its purposes), would not let the matter drop. But there were many other things bothering Spitzer, as the below vivid scene from the article shows.

Manhattan, Sept. 21
The Grand Hyatt Hotel

The governor’s old allies had in mind tough love, not an arm-breaking session. Mr. Cantor and Bob Master, another leader of the Working Families Party, walked into the lobby of the Grand Hyatt New York.

Governor Spitzer was holding a morning of political meetings upstairs. The Working Families Party had endorsed Mr. Spitzer and worked hard for his election. But in the last eight months he had fought with the party over his effort to push through a campaign finance bill that would limit union spending on elections and he had repeatedly insulted the powerful health care workers’ union and the Democratic-controlled State Assembly.

Richard Baum, the secretary to the governor, greeted them in the lobby, three people who were at the meeting recalled. Mr. Cantor previewed his talk in the elevator: The governor had to massage his allies; he had to move on issues like family leave, which played to his political base. And he should not view the political world as divided between the virtuous and the venal.

Mr. Baum smiled, warily. “This should be interesting,” one person recalled him saying. The governor was not used to hearing that sort of criticism.

They took their seats in the governor’s suite, seven or eight men in a tight cluster. Mr. Cantor, glancing at his notes, cataloged their discontents. At the end the governor leaned in, his face less than 12 inches from Mr. Cantor’s.

And Mr. Spitzer began screaming.

“You have no standing to lecture me,” he said, expletives punctuating virtually every third syllable. “You’re part of the system that is the whole problem in this state.”

A year’s worth of perceived slights poured out, as he recalled old political races gone bad and proposals that had died in the Legislature. Curse piled upon curse, spittle flying.

“In the world of politics, calculated rage is really common,” recalled a man who was in the room. “But this was not calculated; this was pure rage and kind of scary to watch.”

Mr. Spitzer bolted upright and walked toward the door. He turned, and said: “I’m going to announce that I’m giving licenses to the undocumented.” Mr. Cantor did a double take. This was worst possible time for a wounded governor to embark on that initiative, no matter how progressive. “You’re going to get killed on this,” he warned, and in fact it would become another in the governor’s first-year collection of failures.

Mr. Spitzer waved him off. He suffered no deficit of confidence.

“No, no, no!” the governor said. “It’s all good. All good.”

Mr. Spitzer pivoted and walked out.

The story suggests that Spitzer launched out of sheer anger his doomed campaign to give illegal aliens drivers licenses—a move which the entire political and media establishement of the state opposed, and which damaged him politically almost as much as Troopergate.

The article ends with this scene:

Manhattan, March 12
Office of the Governor

Eliot Spitzer had taken roughly 100 seconds to announce his resignation before a mob of TV cameras.

He exited the media room into an office hallway. The corridor was lined with young people—staff members, secretaries, idealists and overachievers. He could have easily averted them and walked directly to his office.

But if Mr. Spitzer was disgraced, he did not shrink from the challenge.

“He was at the far end, and he made the point of walking down the length of the hallway,” said one aide who was there. “There was a gantlet of people, and he said what he said.

“I don’t know how you find the words to talk to a young staff at a moment like that,” the aide noted, “but he did it.”

Mr. Spitzer reassured the young people that their futures were still ahead of them. He warned against making the same mistakes he had, from the modest to the catastrophic.

“People think it was hubris and that he must have been a fraud, but that’s not right,” another aide said of the former governor. “He was a very good man who lost himself due to a combination of factors.

“He wanted so much to change things in Albany, but it didn’t work out the way he planned. He couldn’t meet the expectations of the public or the expectations he set for himself. They said he was pushing too hard and not pushing hard enough, that he was Mr. Softee and a steamroller. He felt damned if he did and damned if he didn’t at every turn.”

In such circumstances, without the ability to adjust or relax, “it’s only a matter of time before you self-destruct,” the aide said. “Ironically, he knew full well that he was being watched. He even talked about it. He said: ‘If we ever stumble, they’ll be merciless.’ Those were his words.”

The walk down the hallway over, Mr. Spitzer cried, one of the aides said.

“I couldn’t look,” the aide said.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 23, 2008 07:07 PM | Send