True story: Five years ago, a few months after Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace, I was having breakfast with a friend who’d just suffered a serious and painful loss when a civic project in which he deeply believed and in which he had sunk a great deal of capital went bust.
Spitzer, in jogging gear, came into the restaurant, spotted us, and ran over to the table. “So you’re out of business?” said the ex-governor with a bizarre grin. “I mean, come on, it was never going to work, right? You knew that, right?”
His behavior was so glaringly inappropriate, so tonally deaf and such a weird assault for a man who had supposedly been humbled as he had been humbled, that I figured something out I had not understood until that moment: Eliot Spitzer is nuts.
I don’t mean he’s nuts in a tinfoil-hat sense. I mean that he doesn’t respond to reality in a normal way, and therefore misjudges reality and himself.
Remember that Spitzer took office in a colossal landslide victory in 2006, a victory that gave him unprecedented leeway. He then proceeded systematically to destroy himself.
It wasn’t just his use of prostitutes, or his shocking efforts to get his bank to commit a violation of federal law and not report a large cash-transfer transaction. Long before that came to light, he had turned his victory to ashes.
He did so by waging bizarre personal vendettas against politicians he could have co-opted to create a governing coalition that would have made his governorship a triumph rather than a catastrophe.
Instead, he threatened and screamed and denounced and went around using the state police to gather political intelligence against a foe — a felonious act.
“Who is this guy?” his own wife Silda had asked his one-time best friend, Lloyd Constantine, a year before his disgraced exit.
The thing is, the emotional imbalance he showed in Albany had been evident before — as had the narcissistic notion that rules he self-righteously insisted everyone else follow simply didn’t apply to him. (He brazenly violated campaign-finance rules during his first run for attorney general in 1994, and flatly lied about it when asked during his successful run in 1998.)
As a public official, he was shielded from the effects of this for years — largely because in his tenure as this state’s attorney general he made canny use of media leaks on hot-button Wall Street matters that made him a darling of the press and Manhattan liberals.
Everybody knew Spitzer had a temper and was prone to speak in rather outlandish ways about matters that had yet to be decided by a court.
In pursuing Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the head of the insurance giant AIG, he simply declared his target flatly guilty of “fraud” on national TV — and while Spitzer managed to frighten the AIG board into driving Greenberg into retirement, all criminal charges against Greenberg were eventually dropped. Spitzer has never apologized for what amounted to an act of slander.
Such reckless behavior should have caused red flags to go up all over New York, but instead Spitzer was treated like a hero. Constantine, who later wrote a frightening book about Spitzer’s degeneration in the governor’s mansion, said admiringly in 2005 that Spitzer didn’t “care whether he’s found a mountain or a molehill. If he’s uncovered five grams of venality and that gives him the hook to change things, fine. He uses that as an opportunity to clean house.”
I’d submit this is a terrifying attitude for a government official to take — using junk cases to compel changes in private industries. It’s almost literally a license for arrogant, lawless overreach. Of one of his own wildly questionable gambits, Spitzer self-satisfiedly told Fortune magazine in 2005, “It was a stretch.”
But the line on Spitzer was that he was the tribune of the little guy, a modest government official going up against the rich and powerful and unscrupulous, and he needed sharp elbows and a tough demeanor to measure up.
In point of fact, he was behaving like a goon. His supporters liked his goonishness when it came to Wall Street, and assumed it was a strategy that he’d move beyond when he came to hold real political power.
But it wasn’t a strategy.
His very late entry into the comptroller’s race, with almost no time to get the signatures he needs to get on the ballot, indicates that his impulsivity is still very much at work, as does the amount of time he has been spending on TV rather than being out on the streets getting people to sign on the dotted line.
If he lands on the ballot, the voters of New York City are well within their rights to choose him as the city’s comptroller; crazy people have long been well-represented among elected officials. But New Yorkers should at least be under no illusions about what they’re getting.