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The rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer

BY JENNIFER SMITH | jennifer.smith@newsday.com

March 13, 2008

Eliot Spitzer battled his way into public life, squeaking into the office of attorney general only after a six-week recount and questions over the financing of his campaign.

In that contest a decade ago, clues to his character emerged: Spitzer possessed ambitious public goals, yet his bullish personality and dogged determination to prevail raised hackles and led, at times, to ethical shortcuts that he tolerated little in others.

Spitzer's downfall came as his credibility suffered crippling damage from accusations that the finger-pointing Democratic prosecutor was involved in a high-end prostitution ring. Not so long ago, he had pledged to clean up Albany.

"What he forgot to understand was that he was mortal," said political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked on his 1998 attorney general campaign.

As he announced his intention to leave public life, Spitzer, 48, said he regarded his 15-month governorship "with a sense of what might have been." Some observers called the implosion tragic, both for the man and for the public whose mandate for reform swept Spitzer to victory in 2006 with 69.5 percent of the vote.

Once considered White House material, Spitzer failed to achieve much of the agenda that drove his run for governor.

"He really does care about policy and making the world a better and more progressive place," said Brooke Masters, author of "Spoiling for a Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer," a 2006 biography. "He wanted to accomplish things. Giving that up, he's a governor who did nothing."

Spitzer's inauguration in January of last year was a high point in the career of a man whose crusades against misdeeds in the banking and insurance industries earned him the nickname "The Sheriff of Wall Street."

The son of self-made real estate tycoon Bernard Spitzer, he was born in 1959 and grew up in Riverdale with the advantages conferred by wealth. Spitzer was a brainy athlete who attended the private Horace Mann School. At home, he honed his lawyerly chops during lightning-round political debates at the family dinner table.

Elected student body president at Princeton, he earned a law degree at Harvard, where he met his future wife, Silda Wall. After graduation, he worked in private practice and spent six years at the Manhattan district attorney's office, where he prosecuted racketeering cases.

Spitzer failed to secure his party's nomination for attorney general in 1994, then won the job in 1998 after a fierce contest with incumbent Dennis Vacco. Members of Spitzer's campaign team remember their candidate as strong-minded and decisive, sometimes to a fault.

"It always amazed me that Eliot never said he was wrong," said political consultant George Arzt. "He just goes straight on to the next thing. He would never apologize."

Spitzer's transformation from relative unknown to viable candidate turned on a well-financed campaign paid for, in part, by loans from the elder Spitzer. Vacco had said the loans violated state campaign finance laws. Spitzer eventually conceded that his father financed much of the campaign, but it remained unclear whether the maneuvers were illegal.

Spitzer outlined an ambitious agenda for the office, saying the attorney general should protect the public interest as well as fight crime. During his tenure, he filed aggressive legal actions on behalf of consumers and against federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, that he saw as failing to protect New Yorkers.

"I was really impressed with his firm moral compass," Arzt said. "He ran a great office."

Still, the tactics that served Spitzer well as a prosecutor - among them, using the threat of public humiliation to settle cases - hampered his efforts to transform Albany's entrenched political culture.

The prostitution scandal broke as the governor was working to regain political ground lost during his first year in office, when clashes with legislative leaders and a series of missteps short-circuited his plans for change.

Three weeks after taking office, the governor told Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco (R-Schenectady), who complained he had been excluded from legislative negotiations, "Listen, I'm a - - steamroller, and I'll roll over you and anybody else." Spitzer then alienated many Assembly Democrats the next month when he called their choice for comptroller, Long Island Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli, "totally unqualified" and criticized a Syracuse lawmaker in his own district for backing DiNapoli.

By summer, already strained relations with Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Brunswick) turned irreparably toxic. A state investigation found that two Spitzer aides had improperly asked state police to gather information on Bruno's travels. "Troopergate" further tarnished Spitzer's image as a reformer, said David Birdsell, dean of the Baruch College School of Public Affairs.

In September, Spitzer announced a new policy to make 500,000 to 1 million undocumented immigrants eligible for New York State driver's licenses. The plan drew strong opposition from Republican lawmakers and overwhelming disapproval from New York voters. And it proved to be a political liability for presidential candidate and fellow New York Democrat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Spitzer abandoned the proposal in November.

By December, Spitzer's approval ratings had dropped to 36 percent, an astonishing plunge from 75 percent when he entered office.

Still, while difficult, none of those setbacks were the sort of career-wrecking offense presented by this week's salacious revelations, Birdsell said.

"This is the moral crusader caught out at his own game," Birdsell said. "Now he adds his own poignant example to the litany of cases" that Spitzer himself would have seized upon as reason for reform.