The NA710N

It’s time to play a little political “Where Are They Now?” game. Remember Eliot Spitzer, the holier-than-thou ex-New York Governor who made the mistake of getting caught patronizing a major prostitution ring? It is predictable that Spitzer’s influence would keep him from seeing the inside of a jail cell no matter what his questionable behavior, but that he has yet to join the crew of a low-brow reality show or released a tell-all book comes as somewhat of a surprise.

What he has been investing his time on, sadly, is a return to the political spotlight and the million-dollar industry of guest lecturing. Governor Spitzer is being showcased for a discussion on government intervention in the free market at the Edmund J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University this Thursday. No, that’s not a typo—Governor Eliot Spitzer, whose claim to fame is patronizing a high-end prostitution ring, is lecturing Harvard students on ethical behavior, at least in the marketplace. Spitzer’s lecture is entitled “From Ayn Rand to Ken Feinberg – How Quickly the Paradigm Shifts. What Should Be the Rationale for Government Participation in the Market?” If the goal of the discussion is to provide a comfortable venue to discussion government intervention in the market, a man whose political career is defined by his corporate bullying and private endorsement of illegal companies seems, at the very least, a peculiar choice.

Much in the way former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey erased most of his questionable government practices by dramatically announcing that he was a “Gay American,” so too Spitzer has used Ashley Alexandra Dupré to cast a shadow over a plethora of unflattering abuses of power of which he is guilty. His diversion demands attention before attacking the meat and potatoes of the matter because the Left will not let it rest until it is refuted. Many will argue that Spitzer’s extramarital “business ventures” have little to do with the policies with which he governed the state; that this is just another case of the Right attacking a hot-blooded Democrat a la Bill Clinton. It would be if that were the angle from which Spitzer detractors would like to aim; it isn’t, but let us assume for a second that it is. The difference between Clinton and Spitzer is that nowhere in Clinton’s policies was there any indication that Clinton was a social or moral conservative. Clinton did not dedicate his career to pointing out faults in other politicians the way that Spitzer did, climbing up the political corpses of other public servants who he crucified for being human. On the contrary, Clinton grew to become a beloved figure because something about his demeanor tapped into the endearing hedonist in all of us. Spitzer, on the other hand, is the ultimate hypocrite, the modern equivalent of a lecherous medieval clergyman excommunicating people for such heinous crimes as “living in sin” or “thinking evil thoughts.”

With that out of the way, let us not forget that Spitzer’s indiscretions, while primarily characterized by them, are not limited to his bedroom misadventures. His career as New York Attorney General began with a $5 million loan from his father that broke campaign finance laws. The man who 60 Minutes would later dub “The Sherriff of Wall Street” responded to allegations by claiming that he “didn’t realize how necessary it was to be transparent”. It appears his belief that the free market concept is doomed to failure does not carry into the legal and political world, as he states in a Washington Post opinion piece from last year that the market “needs transparency, capital requirements and fidelity to fiduciary duty. The alternative, as we are seeing, is anarchy.” Funny that anarchy, then, is a political term. Not to mention that it was the law—specifically, an obscure 80-year-old law called the Martin Act—he employed to bring Wall Street’s investment bankers to their knees. And, no, the Martin Act does not require much transparency from the Attorney General, since it “empowers him to subpoena any document he wants from anyone doing business in the state; to keep an investigation totally secret or to make it totally public; and to choose between filing civil or criminal charges whenever he wants. People called in for questioning during Martin Act investigations do not have a right to counsel or a right against self-incrimination.” His first victim was Merrill Lynch, who succumbed after much investigation to admit that it was possible they were giving their clients faulty information on the stock market that they knew to be incorrect. Perhaps Merrill Lynch did not realize how necessary it was to be transparent, either, but Spitzer has not exactly proven to be the merciful type.

His squabble with Merrill Lynch became the cornerstone of his career, and its ethical summit. It was all downhill from there. As governor, he punished New York Congressional districts where the representative had policy disagreements with his administration. He used the state police, as if he still had the Martin Act behind him, to collect potentially damaging information on political rival State Senator Joseph Bruno and leak it to the press (they weren’t able to find anything). He claimed he had no idea the investigation into Bruno’s activities was going on, but 78% of New Yorkers begged to differ. He followed up this act by supporting government permissions for illegal immigrants to acquire drivers’ licenses. This, while not illegal, was certainly not a flattering position. With his name tarnished and his lust for power now obvious to most following the New York political scene, perhaps the fact that he will be forever remembered, as Wonkette fondly put it, as the “Governor of Prostitutes” may be better than being remembered for anything else he did.

Well, he may have been disgraceful in his private life and abusive in his public one, but at least there is one argument that Harvard has going for it on this endeavor: Spitzer has been around Wall Street as much as he’s been around Cambridge, and at the very least could be a useful fountain of advice for America’s future politicos. Here he is talking about the good old law school days. Doesn’t seem like he remembers much of them but, hey, the ends justify the means, right?

Spitzer’s presence at one of America’s premier universities to discuss ethics is comical. His presence to discuss government involvement in the free market is disgraceful, and there is nothing the university can do to mask that. The silence from the other side simply proves that having one’s heart in the right place isn’t enough to combat the outrageous behavior Americans permit in their own educational institutions. The Right worries so much about “indoctrinating our kids” and “The Story of Stuff” and “mmm mmm mmm Barack Hussein Obama” songs that they lose sight of where the real indoctrination is happening. Children are nowhere near as vulnerable to political brainwashing as college students desperate for a respectable identity, especially students in an institution where for many years the College had to pay for alcohol to get the overachieving brats to interact with something other than a book and a laptop. Nor can Americans expect their future politicians to behave ethically when we can stand for our most infamous scoundrels paying their way out of jail as mentors and smudging the wrongs out of their resumes with salacious gossip fodder.

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