When Eliot Spitzer appeared on “The Tonight Show,” Jay Leno asked him how a man so smart could do something so stupid as hiring hookers while governor. Spitzer replied that it was “hubris.”
Hubris sure would explain Spitzer’s decision to release only portions from two years of tax returns. That’s in comparison to his rival for comptroller, Scott Stringer, who released the last five years of his returns and called on Spitzer to do the same.
Now there’s a respectable argument that tax returns contain information that individuals might legitimately want to keep private. It’s just not an argument than can be made with any credibility by Spitzer. During his 2006 run for governor, he said: “I reveal my tax returns every year. I think it’s the right thing to do. I’ve done it since I was running, which goes back 12 years now.”
In his post-scandal career as a TV pundit, moreover, Spitzer jumped on Mitt Romney when the GOP candidate wouldn’t release his returns. Spitzer claimed releasing them was necessary to avoid conflicts of interest and “create the trust that government should have and the public should have in their government officials.”
But now that he’s running to be New York’s chief fiscal officer, guess what? Conflicts of interest don’t matter. Nor does public trust for someone managing $140 billion in public pension funds.
This is the same Eliot Spitzer, by the way, who as attorney general insisted on complete transparency from the business firms he targeted, yet continues to fight to keep his own e-mails on public business secret.
It’s Eliot as usual: one standard for others, and another for himself.