Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Today’s Huge Eliot Spitzer Roundup

Roger L Simon gets it:

… the outcry against Spitzer was not because he was some man seeing a prostitute, but because he was a guy who puts prostitutes in jail seeing a prostitute.

Tung Yin, who also gets it, makes a very important point:

One thing that defenders of Bill Clinton never seemed to acknowledge was that his impeachment wasn’t based merely on the fact of an illicit sexual relationship with an intern, but rather, lies under oath about that relationship.  Here, Spitzer’s conduct is even worse. . . .

It’s not a private matter, as he asserted in his “apology.” (If it were truly private, why would he feel the need to call a press conference about it?) The fact that he, as AG, prosecuted prostitution rings and yet engages one himself, means that he is putting himself above the law.  Had he disagreed with the ban on prostitution, he—as AG—could have declined to prosecute such cases.  He did not.  He obviously felt those laws were worth enforcing.  So why is it “private” when he allegedly engages in it?

John Carney:

There’s a certain poetic quality to this final act of Spitzer’s. His extraordinary popularity with members of the press (now presumably extinguished) was rooted in his willingness to leak, sotto voce, allegations of misconduct in the personal lives of the subjects of his investigations. The press loved the juicy headlines. His motivation was apparently to embarrass and intimidate the subjects of his investigations so that they would be forced to comply. ...

Where did this sense of self-regard come from? Spitzer is the scion of a family made wealthy by real estate investments. He went to Horace Mann High School, graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. Like Barack Obama, he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Many others have emerged from similarly privileged backgrounds without experiencing the ego inflation that fueled Spitzer’s reckless self-regard. Even now, the origins of this deformation of characters remain illegible to the public.

If Spitzer were open to the standards set by those residing beyond the bounds of his own mind, he might take a page from one of the earliest targets of his crusade against Wall Street. In 2002, Spitzer went after Merrill Lynch’s investment banking and research practices. After he described Merrill’s conduct as “a shocking betrayal of trust by one of Wall Street’s most trusted names,” Merrill Lynch stock sank, and the company lost $5 billion in market value in a few days. Reading the writing on the wall, Merrill recognized that the good of its shareholders lay in a quick settlement rather than a protracted defense.

Jim Copland‘s also focusing on the hubris/hypocrisy angle:

Much of the public reaction to Empire State governor Eliot Spitzer’s alleged involvement with Emperors Club prostitutes has focused on rich irony. After all, in his previous role as New York’s attorney general, Spitzer had prosecuted upscale escort services, in addition to his higher-profile campaigns against Wall Street fraud and corruption. Spitzer cultivated an image of himself as a White Knight — a champion against vices both fiscal and physical. But a close look at his public record reveals a man who has become used to the abuse of power — comfortable with the idea of being a law unto himself. Those whom Eliot Spitzer has sought to ruin publicly to serve his political ends — and there are more than a few — doubtless see no irony, no incongruity, in his having allegedly broken the laws he swore to uphold.

Tom Kirkendall asks some damn fine questions:

I hope that the most important lesson that Spitzer’s political career teaches us is not lost amidst the glare of a tawdry sex scandal. As with Rudy Giuliani before him, Spitzer rose to political power through the misuse of the state’s overwhelming prosecutorial power to regulate business interests. In so doing, Spitzer manipulated an all-too-accommodating mainstream media, which never misses an opportunity to take down an easy target such as a wealthy businessperson. Spitzer is now learning that the same media dynamic applies to powerful politicians, as well.

However, ... where was the mainstream media’s scrutiny when Spitzer was destroying wealth, jobs and careers while threatening to go Arthur Andersen on American Insurance Group and other companies? Where was the healthy skepticism of the unrestrained use of the state’s prosecutorial power to regulate business where business had no available regulatory procedure with which to contest Spitzer’s actions?

Meanwhile, Larry Ribstein throws some cold water on the parade:

Let me emphasize that I have absolutely no sympathy for Spitzer as a person. Like the denizens of Dante’s hell, he did get a sort of justice—exactly what he dished out to others. But I want to caution against taking too much satisfaction from Spitzer’s downfall. Like many Americans – from ordinary citizens to corporate executives – he found himself caught in the vast web of our criminal justice system. If he’s prosecuted, who can deny that, as for Lay and Skilling, it will be to some extent because of who he is, rather than for what he’s done. Should Spitzer really go to jail because of the way he took his own cash out of the bank? As Rick Hills appropriately asks, should Spitzer really be subject to federal prosecution for what is essentially a state misdemeanor?

In short, where is the concern for the over-use of the criminal laws and the expansion of federal power? (Bruce Kobayashi and I raised similar questions about somebody else who was as unpopular as Spitzer in some circles – Bill Lerach.) Those who revel in Spitzer’s downfall do so because of the questionable tactics he used for political gain. Yet the revelers are the ones who should be most disturbed about how Spitzer’s downfall was brought about.

The Anchoress, who has lots of video and tons of links:

Never liked him. Always thought he looked like a punk, talked like a punk, acted like a punk .... You KNOW Hillary is going to want this story to go away fast; there are only two places she can go with it, she can play “I sympathize with his victim wife” which doesn’t work, because it reminds everyone of all the Fight-it- Out Cinton High-Drama, or she can try to joke and say, “hey, at least Bill never had to pay,” which probably would not be appreciated, but really, her best bet is to make this go away.

Tom Smith:

What is wrong with these people?  Here’s a brilliant thought.  If you are a prominent public official, don’t have sex with a prostitute.  Many would argue it’s not a good idea, even if you are not a public official.  Hardened types I know, who would not hesitate to say, bludgeon an armed robber to death with a tire iron, so not your squeamish, too nice types, have said, just fuggetaboudit, too much trouble, too dangerous, too many things that can go wrong.  Just go out there and find somebody ugly and dumb enough to have sex with you without actual payment. So, even if you don’t think it’s a morally dubious practice, it still qualifies as probably quite stupid.  But if you are the governor of New York?  If you have lots of powerful people panting for your blood, because you have put them or their pals in jail and given them a lecture to boot?  If you are already married to a perfectly attractive lady?  Spitzer is so utterly, profoundly stupid he makes me embarrassed to be a man.  At least he’s a democrat.

John Carney Part 2:

The baffling refusal of Eliot Spitzer to resign after his dealings with a high-priced prostitution ring were exposed by the New York Times has some experts worried that Spitzer might be destroying documents or other evidence of wrong-doing. On Wall Street, where Spitzer once posed as town Sheriff, fired employees or those under investigation by authorities are often escorted immediately from the office. One reason for this is to prevent them from destroying emails or other electronic paper trails.

A brief excerpt from a long Beldar post that you ought to go read:

Whether it’s on the potential federal charges mentioned above, or something much less savory and much more culpable than money for sex across state lines, my guess is that Spitzer’s lawyers are already in plea negotiations with the federal prosecutors, and that one component of a plea deal under discussion would include his resignation. Resigning, in other words, may be inevitable, but if he is himself a potential target of criminal prosecution and he announces it before plea negotiations are exhausted, it loses its value for that purpose. If, by contrast, he were relatively sure that he’s not himself a potential target of prosecution, and he’d already made a decision to hunker down, I would have expected him to announce that today, to get it all over with at once before going “to the mattresses.”

John Podhoretz (HT: Hewitt):

The thing is, Eliot Spitzer is a crook. I’m not referring to the current prostitution scandal. I’m not referring to the scandal last year involving his senior aides and the leaking of confidential police information to the Albany Times Union. I’m not referring to the threatening phone call he made to the august John Whitehead, retired head of Goldman Sachs, who had the temerity to question a case Spitzer was building against an old friend of Whitehead’s. I’m referring to his conduct dating back to 1994, when he designed a complex scheme involving loans and real estate and collateralized apartments to evade campaign-finance laws so that his own father, Bernard Spitzer, could pay for his campaign as attorney general of New York state. Millions of dollars. And then, in 1998, running for the same office, he did it again. It’s hard to explain, but basically, Spitzer’s father gave him a lot of real estate. He used it to secure loans totaling more than $8 million. Then his father paid back the loans. He was supposed to pay his father back. He said he did. Then he acknowledged he hadn’t. Then somehow it all went away. I’m not a big fan of campaign-finance laws, but they are laws, and they are supposed to apply to everybody.

The rules don’t apply to Eliot Spitzer, or at least, that’s how Eliot Spitzer has acted throughout his public life. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Carol Platt Liebau (HT: Hewitt):

In his statement, Eliot Spitzer notably didn’t announce his resignation.  Rather, he said the following:

“I do not believe that politics, in the long run, is about individuals. It is about ideas, the public good and doing what is best for the state of New York.”

Spitzer may simply be waiting to resign, as doing so could be one of the conditions of a plea agreement.  As a former Attorney General of New York, he presumably is well positioned to understand criminal law and the most advantageous way to handle this problem.

But his wording above is raising speculation that he may not plan to resign.  If that’s true, it’s part of a new and troubling pattern in American political life.  It’s not a partisan thing; Larry Craig’s refusal to resign was another manifestation of it.

The whole idea, pioneered by you-know-who and enabled by you-know-who-else, is that illicit sexual behavior and the scandals resulting therefrom can be brazened out by the insistence that they are irrelevant to the discharge of public duties.  As I argue in my book, it’s all part of a new ethical calculus concluding that—uniquely in the constellation of virtues—sexual morality is a subjective and purely personal matter that’s of relevance only to “religious” people (or else prurient and “judgmental” ones), even when it impacts the public.

Finally, Walter Olson has a huge collection of links that for the most part doesn’t overlap with mine.