Then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer announces his resignation at his...

Then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer announces his resignation at his office in New York City on Wednesday, March 12, 2008. Credit: Newsday File / Alejandra Villa

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer said Thursday that he doesn’t regret picking David Paterson as a running mate and that Bernard Madoff’s Wall Street fraud could have been uncovered quickly, dismissed Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand as a careerist, and said his family is stronger than before he resigned amid a prostitution scandal.

“It’s stupidity that brings people down,” Spitzer said in a Webcast interview on bigthink.com, a business-oriented Web site.

He looked trim in a blue suit, much as he did through his eight years as attorney general and 14 months as governor. Speaking generally, he said “hubris, entitlement and adrenaline” can be the gateway to bad judgment.


“None of us are without fault,” he said. “Mine are very evident to the world.” Spitzer said Paterson, who rose to governor when Spitzer resigned, is making the right fiscal decisions for the state amid difficult times that have sapped the popularity of many governors.

But Spitzer said Gillibrand, the U.S. senator whom Paterson appointed a year ago, is more interested in advancing her career than committing to important principles and policies including gun control. She faces election this year.

The man once called the sheriff of Wall Street said Madoff, whose multibillion-dollar fraud went undetected for 16 years, could have been nabbed in short time — if only someone had a hint of it.

Spitzer said he never heard Madoff’s name until news of his scheme made him one of Wall Street’s most notorious rogues.

Spitzer also said Wall Street’s collapse shows that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, widely respected in office, “didn’t understand the market.”

Of current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Spitzer said he is “just wrong.” Spitzer, once talked about as a possibility to be the first Jewish president, said he understands how President Barack Obama feels, gaining office on a platform of reform, then facing criticism and disappointment a year later. But he says forces of the status quo are formidable in Washington, as in Albany.

Personally, he said he’s moving on from the 2008 scandal but isn’t counting on forgiveness or redemption.

One question made him laugh: He denied that he wore black socks in bed, one of the rumors that came out of the prostitution case.

Afterward, he said in an interview with The Associated Press that he has no plans for public office. He’s teaching a course on government at the City University of New York; running his family’s Manhattan real estate development business; writing columns for Slate, the online magazine; and writing for other publications. He is increasingly interviewed on matters involving Wall Street and politics.

“I’m running for dog keeper in the apartment where I live, and unfortunately I won that one,” he said. “I’m the dog walker.” In the Webcast, when asked where he wanted to be in 10 years, he said he hoped to be in his weekend farm house.

“I’d like to see myself upstate,” he said. “It’s where I find peace and quiet.” At night, he said, he looks at the stars and realizes no individual is that big a deal.

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