Is Eliot Spitzer staging a comeback?
The former New York governor, who resigned in March after he was caught on a federal wiretap arranging for a high-paid prostitute, wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece Sunday about how to save capitalism from its own excesses.
The column, entitled “How to Ground The Street,” looks at ways that Barack Obama’s administration might regulate the financial industry in light of the current crisis, and seems to cry out to vetters, “Pick me, pick me.”
The first part reads like a long self-advertisement as Spitzer describes how he was ahead of the curve in prosecuting corporate fraud as New York’s attorney general.
“When my office, along with the Department of Justice, warned that some of American International Group’s reinsurance transactions were little more than efforts to create the false impression of extra capital … we were jeered at for attacking one of the nation’s great insurance companies,” he writes.
But after the requisite self-congratulation, the man once called “the sheriff of Wall Street” lays out a series of structural problems that he says must be addressed by the next administration, from the failure of corporate governance, to a “balkanized” federal regulatory framework and companies’ unwillingness to provide investors with adequate and accurate information.
Only in the last paragraph does Spitzer acknowledge his own precipitous exit from the public sphere.
“Although mistakes I made in my private life now prevent me from participating in these issues as I have in the past, I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did.”
What to make of the column?
The Wall Street Journal expressed consternation today at the “rapidity and audacity of Spitzer’s attempted self-rehabilitation.”
“Spared a criminal charge, Mr. Spitzer is now re-emerging to offer advice on how to reregulate Wall Street and to assert that he was right all along about everything (save the call girls).”
Others, however, expressed admiration for Spitzer’s smarts and appeared receptive to the prospect of a comeback.
“Do we have to exclude Spitzer from addressing the issues on which he has considerable expertise? Issues that have nothing to do with an unrelated sex scandal?” wrote the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen, suggesting him as the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Meanwhile, Politico’s Ben Smith suggested Spitzer as a replacement for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she’s tapped as secretary of state.
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2 Comments
#1. Ari Goldstein 11.20.2008
The site information is good, but Carol, your moral editorializing about call girls and Spitzer’s past only promotes unnecessary gossip and some abstract moral ground. The article itself quotes people talking about the importance of the information that Spitzer has to offer, and you dance around that quote with more gossip-like editorializing. He is not invalid just because he made poor decisions in his personal life. His advice to Obama on corporate corruption is worthy for our future.
If we were to base our decisions on people who make 100% proper life decisions, then the church would run the country. Religion has its roots in the very fact that people are subject to making bad decisions, and in return teach faith and tolerance.
Should women be upset with men because they were not allowed to vote for some many decades? Should doctors who accidentally kill patients be removed from the medical field if they actually save 99.99% of their patients?
Should Russia have capitulated with the Chechnya Muslim rebels and never fired a weapon into the church while holding hostages?
OBVIOUSLY Spitzer upset a lot of people by convicting them, and anything that the financially ruined victims could say to indemnify him, will be said. And many will do so without being authenticated by the press just for the sake of getting readership.
The objective point of the matter is that Spitzer is in fact intelligent, effective at going after corporate abuses, and DID go after corporate greed to stop it. That same greed is represented by the Big 3, this past week, when they begged for a free $25 Billon bailout. Spitzer has done more in one week of his life to help his country than any press organization will ever accomplish in their entire existence.
I hope as an author of commentary, that you think through more of these topics before writing, and you stop lacing them with editorial comments that make you look silly.
#2. David 12.07.2008
Elliot Spitzer would be a valuable asset to the Obama administration. His experience and intelligence on the matters of harnessing in Wall Street should not be ignored due to his private life failings.
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