JULY 9, 2013
Eliot Spitzer’s first post-scandal job was as the co-anchor of a CNN evening show called “Parker Spitzer.” Before it began airing, in the fall of 2010, I was invited on as one of the lowest species on cable news: the rehearsal tryout guest. It was immediately clear that the show was doomed. Spitzer, with his fierce underbite, talked as if he’d been left ravenous by two years of enforced silence, physically starved for public speech. The other anchor, Kathleen Parker, a moderate conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with honey-colored hair and a honeyed southern accent out of Winter Haven, Florida, could hardly get a word in—she seemed to be hosting a party against her will at the insistence of her hyper-aggressive partner. She was insecure, he was oblivious, and a show promoted as a cute marriage of opposites looked more like some executive producer’s misbegotten matchmaking. Fortunately, whatever was said that day in front of CNN’s cameras never made it on the air, and I wasn’t asked back. “Parker Spitzer” dissolved within a few months, leaving just the liberal-New York-Jewish-male half to carry on.
But “Parker Spitzer” played its part as the first step in Spitzer’s rehabilitation after resigning as governor of New York. Within minutes of meeting me—seconds, maybe—Spitzer, who was having makeup applied before the taping, brought up the scandal. He told me that he had done wrong, that it was no one’s responsibility but his own, and that he hoped he would be able to move on. All this was said to a complete stranger, unsolicited and without context, like part of a ritualized and indiscriminate course of treatment, A.A.-style. As quickly as possible, I changed the subject to the show. Some reporter! I would have been well within my rights to fire off the kind of excruciating personal questions that Spitzer agreed to sit for in Alex Gibney’s documentary “Client 9,” but I was too embarrassed. It was weird, it was repellent (that shiny domed forehead getting patted down with powder), and it was none of my business. Spitzer had to pull me and everyone else into his private life whether I wanted to be or not.
In the hierarchy of sexual scandals, where does visiting prostitutes rank? It depends on who’s judging. From the point of view of a wife, I imagine it would be worse to find out that your husband was carrying on a long-term, serious love affair with a woman in Argentina, as South Carolina’s ex-governor Mark Sanford’s wife Jenny did, which is at least in part why she is now his ex-wife—unlike Silda Wall Spitzer or Huma Abedin, who is the wife of Anthony Weiner. (At the time of Spitzer’s announcement this week, there were reports that he and his wife had separated, which Spitzer denied.) On the other hand, it might be less devastating to be in Abedin’s position, and learn that your husband had simply been sending sexual photographs to women he’d never met. But if the judge is the voting public, the order should be reversed. A love affair is normal human behavior, which helps explain why Mark Sanford is now a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the House of Representatives. Frequenting prostitutes is sordid. (It also tends to be illegal.) Tweeting pictures of your “package” and asking for “due credit” from an Internet friend is patently, narcissistically weird. The bar is higher for Spitzer and Weiner. But in American life there’s almost always a second act.
So Eliot Spitzer is running for office again, for New York City Comptroller. And why not? True, he hasn’t choreographed his return as well as his junior doppelgänger, Anthony Weiner—no early polling, no semi-confessional cover story with a fully reconciled wife in the Times Magazine, no lucrative interim as a corporate consultant. It feels like an impulsive, deadline-inspired move-on, abruptly ending a period of relative anonymity. Spitzer has just a few days to collect three thousand seven hundred and fifty signatures, and a couple of months to convince New Yorkers that we want him back (possibly in tandem with, and a rung down from, the junior doppelgänger). Compared to Weiner, Spitzer is a charmless, grating politician. He also has a much more impressive public record. Watch “Client 9” and see how much corporate titans like Home Depot’s Ken Langone hate him.
Spitzer even has some interesting ideas for a job that hardly anyone can pronounce, let alone explain—and let alone get interested in. Comptroller has historically been an office where colorless career politicians languished—and it might be too small a job for someone of Spitzer’s untethered energies and lust for conflict. But if I were a city employee, I couldn’t imagine a more ferocious watchdog of the funds in which my pension is invested. If I were the mayor, I couldn’t imagine a more annoying officeholder inventing metrics for judging how well the city is spending money on my watch. (The return of scandal to the campaign was surely not the only reason for Weiner’s tense, terse demeanor after Spitzer’s announcement.)
Some New York pols are grumbling about the city becoming a laughingstock. But there’s no point in tsk-tsking Spitzer, any more than Weiner, for asking us to let them back into our lives. Where else are they supposed to go? Both men need public life the way most people crave a degree of privacy. They need to be in the room where powerful people push one another around. They need to be able to pick up the phone and get something done, then admire their handiwork. They need to be talked and written about. They need to be able to say things like: “People have different risk aversion profiles, and it may just be that we were willing to push a little harder, right or wrong,” which was what Spitzer, straining every nerve to sound modest, said when I interviewed him about the lack of high-level prosecutions after the financial crisis. (The implication was that this former New York State Attorney General would have gone after the bastards.)
Greater love hath no man than this, to humiliate himself in pursuit of the people’s love. Such behavior is easily and often written off as some kind of psychological disorder, but, in fact, it lies at the heart of politics. Politicians desperately need the embrace of the people. (There are exceptions. Obama is the obvious one, and, in 2008, his self-sufficiency was part of his appeal. But how much better off would the President now be if the public picked up just a hint of this craving? Where would Clinton have been in his second term without it?) And, whether we want to admit it or not, we’re flattered by the desperate edge in the attentions of these men—we expect it, demand it. When it comes at the price of personal dignity, amid heckling voters and an impertinent, gleeful press, the thrill is all the greater. They must really need us to love them. Weiner and Spitzer are only showing New Yorkers how much they’re willing to do for our love. All we can fairly ask is that they not embarrass us again.
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