Poor Scott Stringer. He thought he had a cakewalk to the city comptroller’s office, but he didn’t count on Eliot Spitzer’s ego.
Spitzer, never lacking in the audacity department, declared for city comptroller Sunday evening, bringing to two the number of spectacularly flamed-out former major officeholders now seeking personal and professional redemption on the city’s fall ballot.
The other would be the irrepressible Tony Weiner, now in pursuit of the mayoralty.
And they both could win. Maybe it’s the talent drought. Maybe space aliens are hovering overhead, shooting Higgs bosons through people’s brains.
Whatever, it’s now time to roll a confessional into City Hall Park: “Bless me, for I have sinned. It has been [fill in blank] years since I last turned my state, my city, my own good name into a late-night-comedy snigger line . . .”
Certainly, Spitzer is in the mood. “The public is forgiving. Whether that forgiveness extends to me is a separate question. I will ask for it,” he said yesterday.
It’s a big ask. As has been Weiner’s — but then they have a lot in common.
Lean and hungry men of substantial intelligence and ambition, they also are narcissistic, ill-tempered underachievers who visited exquisite humiliations on their wives and families — and are as likely as not to do it again, because that’s the way they roll.
For the record, former Rep. Weiner is the cyber-flashing liar, while former Gov. Spitzer is the whore-mongering semi-psychopath who was responsible for the Paterson administration, in all its bizarre pyrotechnics.
But this is Spitzer’s moment in the sun, and he says he wants to be judged on his record — though, presumably, not the Washington hotel room bit; that, technically, involved commission of a crime.
The rest came in two parts:
* Eliot as Sheriff of Wall Street: Spitzer, during his three terms as state attorney general, delighted in torturing the Street — always a tempting target for demagogues because normal people don’t really know what goes on down there or appreciate its enduring value to the city, and folks who make lots of money are natural resentment sponges.
But while he did illuminate some dark Wall Street corners, most of his targets settled their charges rather than endure bad press and crushing expense. In fact, Spitzer never won a Wall Street case at trial, and one big fish who did fight back — former New York Stock Exchange boss Dick Grasso — beat his pants off.
Assume, however, that the crusade will resume should Spitzer become comptroller — never mind that Wall Street is the pump that keeps the municipal bank accounts full.
* Eliot as “F–king Steamroller”: That was his term, sort of a keynote self-descriptive uttered early in his gubernatorial tenure during a tirade aimed at a stubborn state legislator.
It was a threat, and it was a harbinger. For it turned out that if Eliot Spitzer couldn’t billy-club someone with a subpoena, he was Little Boy Lost — a tantrum-tossing piece of work who once sicced state troopers on another lawmaker he couldn’t get along with.
He accomplished exactly nothing during his 14-plus month tenure, and it was a mercy when the harlot hijinks forced him from office — forever Client 9 — and never mind the chaotic aftermath.
Now Spitzer’s back, just like Tony Weiner. And, as with Weiner, he’s going to have an impact — not because of past accomplishments, because they have none of which to speak, but because the competition is so weak.
The mayoral field speaks for its own sad self.
Of Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president now running for comptroller, the best that can be said is that he’s a very nice fellow who spent 14 years as a state legislator, mostly doing Speaker Sheldon Silver’s bidding. And that the borough presidency, any borough presidency, is a hopeless, hollow sinecure.
Not so, of course, the job once held by the Libertarian candidate on the comptroller ballot: Kristin Davis, Spitzer’s erstwhile procurer, will be on hand to prove that, yes indeed, the gods have a sense of humor.
Too bad New York City is the butt of the joke.