Is It Wrong to Feel Sympathy for Eliot Spitzer?
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I have a strange fascination with Eliot Spitzer. There, I said it. It's true. I suppose that's in part due to the fact that when Spitzergate roared its way into the headlines, I was running a project in which I was (for reasons that now escape me) collecting e-mails from men who had paid for sex about why they had paid for sex. Spitzer was one of those guys. I mean, he didn't send me an e-mail (not that I'm aware of, anyway), but he was one more john who had paid for sex, and the only difference was that A) he had gotten caught and B) he was famous.
Since, I've followed the guy's fall from grace and heady reascent to Slate columnist. Most recently, the kids over at Vanity Fair took him out to lunch, and John Heilpern succeeds in getting the former governor to open up over hotdogs. These days, Spitzer works for his father, a real estate tycoon. He's worked doggedly to rehabilitate his reputation, but his candor is surprising (for a politician, at least). "What I did was heinous and wrong," he has concluded. Apparently, he's got a shrink, or something like it. "But I don’t view it like, 'Gee! I’m in therapy,'" he protests.
He appears to be most ashamed of having successfully ruined his own hard-won legacy. "And that is a very hard thing to live with," he notes. "When he turned away," Heilpern observes, "I could see he was in tears." It was a moving scene. Or maybe just the crocodile tears of a narcissist who had lost the spotlight.
Susannah Breslin Freelance journalist, blogger, photographer.
Comments
I don't know if sympathy is the word, but sadness? Yeah.
By: sugar_k | Wed, 06/17/2009 - 08:24
I thought the world of Eliot Spitzer. He was the most promising Democratic politician in the country. So, although prostitution turns my stomach and I felt personally betrayed when the revelations broke, my strongest feeling was anger that a politician would be so stupid. It's about the same way I felt when Bill Clinton ruined Democratic hopes for a decade by getting special pizza from an intern when he knew damn well that Republicans were foaming at the mouth for anything that would discredit him. Sure, a pox on Roger Stone, the GOP operative who broke the news and who wouldn't have known a thing about it if he hadn't been a whoremonger himself, but Republican scumbags are a fact of life, and nobody knew that better than Spitzer himself. The infidelity is for him and his wife to deal with, but he let down millions of voters with his foolish mistake.
That said, I agree with the previous commenter that I have some measure of grudging respect for the way he handled things, resigning right away. It fits with his pattern of always doing the right thing, except the one ( or five or six) times when it mattered.
Sure.
By: Elle | Tue, 06/16/2009 - 10:29
I don't know why it's not possible to at least shake your head sadly. I don't take pleasure in watching people wreck their lives and reputations. If we were hardliners about doling out sympathy, we'd have to turn the same cold eye to women who date married men, to people who thought they'd make quick money in real estate, and so on. People behave stupidly, sometimes very stupidly, sometimes downright irrationally.
I can have a small amount of grudging respect for Spitzer. At least he took responsibility and resigned immediately instead of pretending he had no idea what people were talking about or accusing his political enemies of being out to get him. That may not be much, but it's a little something.