There's a new book, and a new movie—and ever-sharper jabs at his political rivals. Lloyd Grove talks to the disgraced ex-New York governor about the odds of his running for office soon.
First he dipped a toe in the water with a recurring column for the online magazine Slate. Then he made the rounds of cable television appearances, touting his prescriptions for Wall Street reform amid rumors of a possible run for public office.
And now, two years after his first term as governor of New York was rudely cut short by a prostitution scandal, Eliot Spitzer’s coming-out party is in full cry.
“There is not, nor has there been, some orchestrated effort to do anything in particular,” Spitzer told me in an interview with The Daily Beast. “Let’s be very clear. It has been enormously painful not to be doing the job I was elected to do.”
“I wouldn’t call any of this ‘liberating,’” Spitzer said. “But you’re trying to make a much more subtle point: Is there some closure? And I guess there is.”
In recent weeks, the 50-year-old Spitzer has been sounding off about undeclared gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo (his successor as state attorney general, Spitzer claims, is too timid, too political, and too connected to special interests) and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (too soft on his Wall Street pals, too resistant to reform). A week ago, Spitzer showed up at the 92nd Street Y for a grilling by CBS News political correspondent Jeff Greenfield.
What’s more, the disgraced ex-guv is the star of a much-buzzed-about, largely sympathetic documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney—which was screened in unfinished, untitled form last month at the Tribeca Film Festival—and the subject of a companion biography, Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, by investigative journalist Peter Elkind.
If Spitzer is relevant again, did he ever imagine that his rehabilitation would come so soon after his downfall?
“I haven’t really thought about it,” Spitzer answered in nasal tones. His airways are stuffed up from a cold caught during a recent jaunt with his wife, Silda, to a conference in Madrid. When I asked what are the chances that he’ll run for office anytime soon, especially for state comptroller, he answered, “About zero.”
Slender and athletic-looking, Spitzer sat loose-limbed at a small table in the light-filled corner office, overlooking Central Park, that he occupies at his father Bernard Spitzer’s real estate company—on a high floor of a 1921-vintage office building that the elder Spitzer bought years ago from some shell companies controlled by the Philippines’ ruling Marcos family. Eliot had doffed his suit jacket, and wore a pristine, starched-white shirt and precisely-knotted tie.
He told me that after avoiding the Tribeca Film Festival screening, he had finally gritted his teeth and watched Gibney’s movie.
“I looked at it, I didn’t pass judgment,” he said. The documentary chronicles Spitzer’s career as a hard-charging prosecutor and attorney general, the so-called Sheriff of Wall Street, and his brief governorship foiled by an obsessive appetite for call girls (and, the movie argues, a vindictive campaign by Spitzer’s enemies on Wall Street, notably venture capitalist Kenneth Langone, and the politically motivated Bush Justice Department).
“It was not easy to watch stuff like that,” Spitzer said about the film, for which he sat for several on-camera interviews, as did the perky madam of the Emperor’s Club VIP, Spitzer’s supplier of choice, and an actress who dramatized the transcript of Gibney’s off-camera interview with the governor’s favorite call girl (not Ashley Dupre). “On the other hand, I thought it was a fair, very fair, rendition. Have you seen it?”
I have, I answered—and thought it wouldn’t have hurt to trim 10 or 15 minutes out of it. “You can pick which lines can come out,” Spitzer said with a rueful smile. “Maybe you could change the end of it, too!”
I asked if it was an out-of-body experience to watch himself being dissected on the political autopsy table.
“Without anesthesia!” he said with a laugh.
Why did he decide to cooperate with Gibney and Elkind?
“When you say ‘cooperate,’ I cooperated to an extent, but I had absolutely nothing to do with what they did or how they did it…The answer is, yes, I did trust them. Part of the calculation of whether or not you cooperate is their work. Peter Elkind is an insightful, superb journalist. What Alex Gibney did with Taxi to the Dark Side [the 2008 Academy Award-winner for Best Documentary] and the Enron movie [ The Smartest Guys in the Room]—these guys were serious journalists...This wasn’t going to be salacious.”
Is it liberating, finally, to have it all out there?
“I wouldn’t call any of this ‘liberating,’” Spitzer said. “But you’re trying to make a much more subtle point: Is there some closure? And I guess there is.”
Spitzer said he’s made a judgment that in order to be taken seriously, he has to talk about his personal foibles in public and get it over with. “I’ve always tried to be pretty honest with the public when I was in office,” he said. “Look, if in talking about the stuff I care about deeply—policy issues—some of the other stuff comes up, it’s hard to avoid it. It’s not easy. It’s not easy at all. Only because I want to be heard on the stuff I do care about, I think inevitably I have to go through a period where I do talk about the other stuff. I can’t pretend that there are not legitimate questions for people to ask. At some point I will say, ‘Look, I’ve done it already.’”
An idea Spitzer has been pushing lately is for the New York State Comptroller—who decides how about $120 billion in employee pension funds are invested—to flex his muscles as a major stockholder and influence the behavior of corporate CEOs. Spitzer argues that if several state comptrollers join together to pool their weaponry, they will have even more power to affect how public companies conduct their affairs.
“Take the example of corporate compensation,” Spitzer said. “Whose money are they taking? The shareholders’ money! So you say to the CEOs, ‘Wait a minute, guys.’ We don’t need a law to determine what the corporate culture should be. The shareholders get to determine that. So we’re going to elect boards of directors to look at compensation and bonuses and clawbacks. That’s the responsibility of owners. That’s what shareholders do. We’re telling CEOs, ‘We want you to be the best CEO, and being the best CEO doesn’t mean giving you a $100 million bonus without creating value for the long term.' ”
Spitzer talked with enthusiasm about the political science course he is teaching this term at City College of New York—a survey of the history of economic analysis from Marx to Galbraith, with dollops of John Stuart Mill, Robert Nozick and Thomas Friedman thrown in for good measure.
“The problem with understanding market theory is that people don’t study market failure—which of course in back in vogue,” Spitzer told me. “ ‘Market failure’—these are the two most important words in understanding capitalism…Talking about the market, it’s easy to say supply and demand works. But it’s where it doesn’t work, and understanding where it doesn’t work, is what we’ve got to figure out.”
Spitzer goes on: “The kids [his students] are wonderful. When you look at the world going over the cliff, the thing that gives you confidence is the energy of the kids who are ready to pick up the baton and run with it…By the way, if you want to enroll in the course, I’m a tough grader.”
In the meantime, Spitzer appears to be looking for the deeper meaning of life in his tennis game. “My backhand isn’t what it should be. You play tennis? I’ve always said politicians are frustrated athletes. If you could have chosen one or the other, most of us would have chosen athleticism," he said.."One of the hardest things in life is to determine whether to do the sliced backhand or go with the topspin backhand. And that ambivalence has been at the root of much agony.”
If only things were that simple.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.