Character Is Destiny

...Clean, as CNN and Reuters put it...

...His approval ratings started falling in the fi rst weeks of his becoming governor and never recovered...

...He was in it for the game itself, as though debates over public policy and legislation were like chess matches or touch football...

...Some of his old supporters on the left, wallowing in their glorious hopes for him, are calling Spitzer’s fall a tragedy...

...His volcanic outbursts, inept management, and penchant for incessant dishonesty and hypocrisy rendered him unfi t in a political blink of the eye...

...Tragedy requires an initial nobility of purpose...

...Like Alexei in Dostoyevsky’s Gambler, Spitzer couldn’t but act in a “reckless and unseemly way...

...He also grew increasingly risky in his public behavior—consulting no one, for instance, when he pushed for driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants despite overwhelming public opposition and despite the embarassment this brought to Hillary Clinton whom he had endorsed for the Democratic nomination...

...Not everyone caught on immediately, of course, and for good reason...

...Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is a professor at the Cooper Union for Science & Art...

...Now we know he was reckless in private as well...

...Either way, he prospered so long as the only assessment that mattered was that of allies in the press and in politics...

...With three years to go in his term, the hunt was already on for a replacement...

...The juxtaposition of the Spitzer who made morals and ethics the hallmark of his career with the hooker-loving married man caught with his pants down was presented as a delicious morality tale...

...When he took offi ce in January 2007, Spitzer looked to be on his way to the White House...

...Eliot Spitzer, it turns out, was a world-class con man and had the ability to fool many people for some of the time...

...While the details of his demise truly were dramatic, there is a fl aw in the fallen crusader narrative...

...Spitzer’s con was different only in his chosen fi eld...

...In the last poll taken before the sex scandal hit, only a quarter of the respondents said they would vote for Spitzer again...

...His Obamalike campaign slogan was “Day One, Everything Changes...

...New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was the most popular pick, walloping Spitzer in polls...

...Polls over the last six months had consistently shown that even a majority of Democrats wanted someone else as governor...

...Con men, of course, are not unique to politics...

...That scandal has still not been resolved because Spitzer has never been forced to testify despite the Albany district attorney empaneling a grand jury to sort out the mess...

...Spitzer, Michael Goodwin noted in October 2007, “is moving downhill faster and earlier than McGreevey did...

...Character is destiny, and he couldn’t get out of his own way...

...With his reputation shredded and his administration under fi re, he is now in desperate need of a savior himself...

...They are wrong...

...We are absolutely going to sweep it out...

...By the time Spitzer fell, it was only the liberal media that still thought of him as Mr...

...It was a remarkable turnaround for someone elected in a landslide after a 2006 campaign in which he was never seriously challenged...

...That alone should have raised red fl ags, but it didn’t...

...Like a shooting star, he was brilliant while he lasted...

...The New York Times and the New Republic had talked of “Spitzerism” as the path to the party’s future...

...Five months before the election, he said that just as “Only Nixon could go to China,” only a tough-minded Democrat like himself could reform Albany, vowing, “We will turn that world upside down...

...With the sizingup skill of a Times Square bunko artist, he had a knack for telling people what they wanted to hear about a dysfunctional state capital...

...He was none of the above...

...In their minds, his image as the “Sheriff of Wall Street” was etched in stone...

...Emboldened by his successes and oblivious to his defeats, he pushed his luck and raised the stakes...

...In August, we noted in these pages that Spitzer “is already damaged politically, perhaps beyond repair...

...While his eight years as attorney general looked to be a stepping stone to greater and greater glory, it was, instead, all downhill from there...

...He knew how to play on the desires of his victims and succeeded because the voters, the unions, the special interest groups, and the liberal media were willing victims...

...Any new sordid details could fi nish him...

...The prostitution scandal was the fall of Mr...

...BY MICHAEL GOODWIN & FRED SIEGEL A popular media narrative last week was that the sordid revelations that brought down New York governor Eliot Spitzer were a total shock to New Yorkers because he was universally regarded as a paragon of probity...

...The cause of Spitzer’s troubles was always the same: his character fl aws...

...He went up against a competent opponent in the primary, Nassau County executive Tom Suozzi, but won with 81 percent of the vote...

...He was so obviously off course that it was possible to compare him to New Jersey governor Jim (“I am a gay American”) McGreevey, who had been forced to resign in his third year in offi ce...

...We were repeatedly reminded that Time had once dubbed him “Crusader of the Year...

...Business produced the Enron crowd, religion gave us Jimmy Swaggart, and Jayson Blair proved that journalists are capable of the big con...

...Ditto for the general election, where Spitzer gained nearly 70 percent against former Republican assemblyman John Faso...

...At different times he presented himself as a centrist Democrat, as a progressive Democrat, and as a conservative Democrat...

...Positions and policies didn’t matter to him...

...Unless he gets his act together, he could meet the same end and have the same legacy...

...Michael Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a columnist for the New York Daily News and a contributor to CNN...

...Clean...

...It wasn’t until July 2007, when the New York Post’s Fred Dicker broke the fi rst stories on Spitzer’s attempt to use the state police to bring down a Republican political rival, Senate majority leader Joe Bruno, that the already manifest problems with Spitzer’s character began to draw widespread attention...

...When Spitzer went after New York Stock Exchange president Richard Grasso for what the attorney general saw as an excessively generous buyout package, he refused to criticize fellow Democrat Carl McCall, the former New York State comptroller and the man most responsible for the Grasso package...

...They alone still saw a political rock star and a savior of the Democratic party...

...After making his reputation by exposing double dealing at brokerage fi rms like Merrill Lynch, Spitzer began to use leaks and, ironically, sexual innuendo to force fi rms to pay huge settlements or face a public trial at the hands of an enraptured media...

...Talking about his long association with hookers, some said he was so riven with inner confl icts he wanted to get caught...

...Most New Yorkers, though, had long had their fi ll of Eliot Spitzer...

...Despite what some of his apologists maintain, the relentless unraveling of his administration was not driven by inexperience or political mistakes or even entrenched opponents...

...More likely, he believed he was too smart to get caught...

...But once he became governor and entered a more level playing fi eld where opponents had real power to strike back, he was in over his head...

...He was elected attorney general by breaking the campaign fi nance laws and then lying about it (as we noted in THE WEEKLY STANDARD of August 20, 2007...

...As Congressman Charlie Rangel put it, Spitzer always thinks he’s the “smartest man in the room...

...Spitzer had reason to think he would never be called to account...

...The con has been revealed and the crusader is beyond redemption...