Eliot Spitzer: A Greek Playwright's Dream

It's one of the oldest stories known to humanity: the classic tragedy. Man rises to power, accomplishes a few great things, gets lost in his own hubris, and proceeds to bring about his own downfall by clouding good judgment with excessive arrogance. Usually, lack of respect for tradition plays a role as well. A couple millennia ago, Euripides perfected this storyline in the Bacchae among other works. It is incredible how aptly this model of tragedy serves in summing up Eliot Spitzer's public life.

Eliot Spitzer's life has not been a rags-to-riches story. His father's, however, was. A New York real estate tycoon living in Riverdale whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Austria, Bernard Spitzer raised his son to be a leader. The beneficiary of an Ivy League education, Eliot was smart as a whip and seemed to have a disdain for entrenched wealth. Within a few years out of law school, he had successfully brought leaders of the notorious Gambino crime family to justice.

Soon afterward, Spitzer became New York's Attorney General with a track record for busting corporate crime. It is in this role that he developed into the man we know, a modern-day Elliot Ness with little respect for authority, a mean streak and sky-high personal aspirations. He quickly became a top nemesis of Wall Street executives and other fatcats extraordinaire. At the same time, he was able to tap into a sense of public frustration with widening income inequality and the extreme excess at the top of the economic scale. As the newfound champion of the little guy, Spitzer was poised to achieve greatness.

However, the attributes which served him so well as a prosecutor have proven to be ill-suited for the executive branch. Being elected in a historic landslide with nearly 70% 0f the vote, Spitzer might have thought he didn't owe anyone any favors. Nevertheless, a cardinal rule of maintaining political power is "don't piss off your allies!". The moment I knew he might be over his head was when he chose to directly butt heads with the most powerful union in the state, SEIU1199, by proposing to cut over $1 billion from Medicaid and hospitals in his first budget recommendation. Immediately before that he had deeply upset Assembly Democrats by failing to support the appointment of one of their own, Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli (D-Long Island), to the open Comptroller's job. As with most other instances where Spitzer quixotically attempted to ramrod controversial proposals through the political process, he lost both of these battles. Following another highly contentious fight over driver's license for undocumented immigrants (he backed off of that proposal with his tail between his legs), the Governor's approval/disapproval rating had just about flipped in less than a year.

Ultimately, Eliot Spitzer was so weakened that this week's revelations proved an almost fitting end to his spectacular flameout. He was already a lame duck just a year into his term, had made enemies of nearly everybody in Albany, and Wall Street had a virtual bounty on his head. It was very difficult to see how Spitzer would have made it through his term even if his "Mr. Clean" image had held up. What better way for him to depart the scene than with the revelation of a perfectly insidious behavioral streak borne of pure hubris?

Somewhere, an ancient Greek tragedian is smiling.

Note: Dan Cantor of the Working Families Party just wrote an excellent review of the Spitzer regime and its implications for the economic justice movement, and I encourage you to take a look at that for a better idea of the NY activists' perspective.