1) Let’s start at the ending: Is there any way Spitzer can survive this scandal and remain in office? Right now, it looks like he’ll be gone within hours. Then again, it looked that way yesterday at this time. One of the few lasting legacies of the Clinton administration is that Bill Clinton successfully defined this particular kind of deviancy down. Politicians can now outlast sex scandals. If there’s a major legal problem at the heart of the Spitzer scandal such as Spitzer laundering money to pay for his dalliances, then he’s a dead demagogue walking. But if it’s just (or pretty much just) about the sex, he could brass it out. 2) What about the New York Republican party’s plan to begin impeachment procedures within 48 hours unless Spitzer falls on his sword? Perfectly stupid. Leave it to the Republicans to toss their drowning antagonist a life preserver. Spitzer’s only hope of surviving this thing is to circle the partisan wagons. Already on the leading lefty blogs, some of the kooky kids are framing this as Spitzer vs. Bush (if you can believe it). By making it a partisan thing, the New York Republicans are playing right into Spitzer’s only prayer. 3) So what should New York Republicans make of this issue? The same thing everyone should – it’s a moral issue, and reflects on what kind of standards we as a society should insist on from the people who seek to lead us. Even most Democrats, after a mere sixteen years, are beginning to blanche at Clinton-style morals and seeking something more noble. We could have a genuine bipartisan (or post-partisan!) moment here where the country demands that our leaders at least give being decent people the old college try. 4) Oh, big deal! You’re the hypocrite. I don’t recall you Republicans insisting that Larry Craig or David Vitter resign. I did, not that anyone cared. So did others. Mitt Romney called Larry Craig, who was then a ranking Romney campaign muckety-muck, disgusting. That was refreshingly candid. Many other conservatives felt the same way, and said as much publicly. 5) Okay, you’re a prurient Republican prude. Got it. But don’t you think we should be forgiving of other men’s moral frailties. Of course we should be forgiving of other men’s moral frailties. We should also help old ladies cross the street when the chance to do so avails itself. But that’s not really the point with Spitzer, Clinton, Craig, or Vitter. If you seek to credibly lead millions of people, you need a modicum of moral stature. These men all sacrificed their moral stature. We can feel badly for them. We can forgive them. But doing so doesn’t mean we have to accept a lack of honor from our leadership class. 6) I think all you conservative hypocrites should have your closets snooped into! We’re all hypocrites inasmuch as we all have values that we fail to live up. But that doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge a couple of major differences between the Larry Craig and Eliot Spitzer-types and the rest of us. Senator Craig and Governor Spitzer fell a bit shorter than the rest of us tend to. More important, guys like Craig and Spitzer sought leadership roles in our society. When you seek such a prominent public role, your realm of “private matters” necessarily shrinks. That’s just the way it is. The rest of us are private citizens leading private lives. Public figures who seek and enjoy public power are governed by different rules. 7) But all of the affairs we’re discussing here are essentially private matters, are they not? I’d agree with that, but you have to allow that cruising for sex in a public bathroom is something less than a totally private affair. After all, as Mark Steyn noted at the time, even if the cruising senator had made a love connection, it’s not like the two lovebirds would have checked into the Honeymoon Suite at the Airport Radisson. And given that prostitution rings had tasted the zeal of Lawman Eliot Spitzer, his scandal is also less than entirely private. 8) So you do agree that these are mostly private matters. Shouldn’t we therefore just be willing to move on? No, no, a thousand times no. As a society we have the right to insist on honor and propriety from our leadership class. And you’d have to be pretty naïve to not realize that the dishonor that guys like Eliot Spitzer display at the Emperor’s Club shows up in our governmental affairs as things like unprincipled flip-flops, earmarks, and other dreary staples of our political life. 9) So is Spitzer at risk of losing his job because he’s been revealed as a hypocrite? Not exactly. He’s at risk of losing his job because he revealed himself as a really big hypocrite. An enormous hypocrite. A Guinness Book of Records hypocrite… 10) We get the point. But isn’t this somewhat less than satisfying? After all, like you said, we’re all hypocrites. It is less than satisfying. It’s a bit like arresting Al Capone on tax evasion. Sure it got him off the streets, but his real sins went unaddressed. 11) You’re comparing Spitzer to Capone? Not exactly. But Spitzer was a dreadful public figure, a sneering bully who ruined lives to build a political career. And yet we can’t deny his strategy worked. He crookedly funded his first race for Attorney General. Once elected Attorney General, he became a successful enough demagogue that he got elected Governor. No prosecutor had a higher ratio of outraged press conferences to actual trials, let alone convictions. Even high profile Spitzer witch-hunt victims like Dick Grasso never had a day in court. As the Wall Street Journal’s excellent editorial this morning pointed out, Spitzer abused his office flagrantly and repeatedly. And the voters rewarded him. So seeing him being tripped up on a $4300/hr. call girl is a lot less satisfying than if the voters had rejected his odious form of politics.
