Eliot Spitzer running for city comptroller

Eliot Spitzer in a media scrum yesterday

Surely this must have been Eliot Spitzer’s thinking before he announced for city comptroller. Looking out at the political landscape he would have seen, for example, South Carolina’s Mark Sanford winning election to Congress after having gone AWOL as governor to carry on an affair in Argentina. Or, closer to home, Anthony Weiner now running for mayor after leaving Congress in disgrace for having tweeted images of his privates to women.

If these and others can come back, why not a governor caught procuring consenting hookers? “I’m hoping there will be forgiveness,” says Spitzer.

Or how about his first campaign for attorney general? He swore up and down that he’d financed it through loans from his wealthy father that were repaid. Later, we learned it was his father who covered the loans — which made them illegal donations, not loans. All this to help him win office as New York’s chief law enforcer.Perhaps New Yorkers will forgive him for publicly humiliating his wife and children when his prostitution habit was exposed. But a taste for call girls may be the least of the ethical lapses of Eliot Spitzer. It helps here to recall how he was caught: When he pressed officials at his bank in New York to remove his name from wire transfers he was sending to the escort agency, they refused — and alerted authorities that something improper was going on.

Not to mention the way he bullied Hank Greenberg into resigning as AIG chairman, and the decline of the company that followed.

Spitzer called himself a “steamroller,” though as governor his agenda was steamrolled by Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver. Meanwhile, he used state police to spy on political enemies, and then tried to cover it up.

The conventional thinking holds that Spitzer hopes New Yorkers won’t spend too much time revisiting the headlines he generated as Client No. 9. But it’s equally possible he’s betting that a focus on his sex life may help him distract attention from his other, more destructive behavior as both attorney general and governor.

[Source: NYPost]