The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Some of the comments I've read that were posted today with articles about New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's association with a prostitution ring indicate that there are many readers who don't understand the issues that are involved.

I read comments from several readers today who felt that extramarital sex was really a victimless crime. Some readers compared Spitzer's activities to Larry Craig's activity in the Minneapolis airport men's room last summer.

Well, no matter what one thinks of Larry Craig, he didn't transport anyone across state lines for sexual purposes. Spitzer apparently did. And doing so was a violation of federal law. The Mann Act, to be precise.

It would be a violation of the law even if the woman involved turned out to be Spitzer's mistress and not a prostitute. Money doesn't have to change hands for a violation of the Mann Act to occur.

But money did change hands. The indictment mentions an international prostitution ring, doing business in New York, Washington, London, Paris. That goes beyond state lines.

For that matter, anyone who thinks Spitzer's acts had no victims, I suggest, should watch a tape of Spitzer's press conference on Monday. Does his wife look like she wasn't a victim?

I've seen a lot of examples of sympathy for Mrs. Spitzer. But I haven't seen a single good word in the press for the governor.

Well, maybe that's not entirely true. ABC News says a 22-year-old escort, who admits Spitzer was one of her clients when he was attorney general two years ago, reports that Spitzer "didn't do anything that wasn't clean" and he tipped well.

In the New York Post, Frederic Dicker says Spitzer is getting his "comeuppance." He couldn't be trusted by friend or foe.

"If you were his enemy, you were in danger," Dicker writes. "If you were his friend, you were in danger, too."

The word "comeuppance" is enjoying a surge in popularity these days. Terence Corcoran uses it in National Post. He has some other words for what Spitzer's been up to.

"As a high-level subject for economic study, it would be interesting to know how $5,500 an hour compares with, say, the going rate for a top takeover specialist at a Wall Street law firm," Corcoran writes. "Or, on a comparative value basis, why is such a service worth less than the $6,000 one of Mr. Spitzer's corporate trophies, Tyco CEO Dennis Koslowski, paid for a shower curtain? Maybe it depended on who he was showering with."

But back to Dicker's assessment -- that neither friends nor foes could trust Spitzer.

Hillary Clinton thought Spitzer was her friend. But, as John Nichols points out in The Nation, "Despite the fact that Clinton is the senator from New York state, Spitzer did not endorse her until after Clinton was forced to make a high profile visit to ask the Governor for his support. Even when it came, Spitzer -- whose own ambitions to be attorney general, vice president or even president were no secret -- did not campaign all that hard for Clinton."

In fact, Nichols notes, Clinton's best, most visible ally in New York was Lt. Gov. David Paterson, a black man who stands to become New York's first black governor if Spitzer resigns, as expected.

"After the endorsement was secured, Spitzer first became a problem for Clinton when she struggled to defend and then distance herself from his proposal to make it easier for immigrants to obtain drivers' licenses," writes Nichols. "He is a much bigger problem now."

The Clinton campaign knows how incendiary the Spitzer situation is. "The Clinton campaign immediately began sponging Spitzer's name from the Senator's campaign website," Nichols says, "just as Idaho Senator Larry Craig's name disappeared from the website of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney after Craig's bathroom troubles in Minneapolis."

It is to Clinton's advantage to get Spitzer out of office quickly -- and as quietly as possible. With Barack Obama winning more than four-fifths of the black vote in the primaries, a high-profile black officeholder in her corner (like New York's lieutenant governor) can benefit Clinton. But to get there from here, Clinton may have to endure some difficult times.

"The Spitzer trip up is a made-for-TV -- and really made-for-The New York Post -- scandal," Nichols says. "The media won't let go of this one, and sooner or later Tim Russert and Chris Matthews are going to be obsessed with everything Hillary Clinton has to say about it.

"Clinton will be answering breathless questions about all her governor's troubles, about whether he should resign and, of course, about her impressions of what it means when prominent political players -- like governors or, say, presidents in the 1990s -- get wrapped up in sex scandals."

As New York's attorney general, Spitzer made life difficult for traders on Wall Street; Spitzer "long has been viewed with fear and contempt" there, write Aaron Lucchetti and Monica Langley in the Wall Street Journal.

Now, with Spitzer's downfall nearly complete, "It's Schadenfreude time on Wall Street." (By the way, if you never took German in school, Schadenfreude means to take pleasure from someone else's misfortune.)

Michael Goodwin makes the case, in the New York Daily News, that Spitzer, like Jim McGreevey, former governor of New Jersey who resigned in the third year of his administration after acknowledging that he had a homosexual affair, "wasted the governorship because of an enormous character flaw: not recognizing how he was trapped by his own dishonesty."

Character flaw is a rather nice way of putting it, don't you think?