Eliot Spitzer may well be as intelligent, creative and fearless as any city controller candidate in the history of the Republic.
He is also running a horribly disappointing and uninspiring campaign.
For years, the former governor was prescient and courageous on issues ranging from financial misconduct to marriage equality and stop-and-frisk. And he remade the attorney general’s office into a legal haven for economic and social justice.
But thus far, his candidacy has evoked privilege and disingenuousness more than progressive leadership.
Start with his decision to finance his campaign with his family fortune. He’s said he needed to use his own money because he joined the campaign too late to raise sufficient funds to compete. That may be, but doing so knowingly subverts a uniquely progressive public finance system designed to give all New Yorkers a chance to compete on even ground, regardless of wealth.
But even after making that decision, Spitzer still had a chance to fund his campaign with reason and integrity. Opponent Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, proposed that both candidates agree to a spending cap of approximately $4 million. That would have ensured that both sides were well-financed, but playing on even ground.
Not only did Spitzer refuse, he doubled down. According to the New York Times, he spent $2.5 million since entering the campaign in mid-July. From July 12 to Aug. 5, Stringer spent just $173,000.
As Stringer has drawn support from outside groups, including both organized labor and Wall Street, Spitzer has resorted to the ultimate bully move: bashing his opponent for spending intended to help him compete with Spitzer’s lavish self-funding.
“You say repeatedly I’m trying to buy this election, Scott,” Spitzer said in a debate Monday. “I’m just trying to keep up with you, keep up with the money you’re going to spend, and all the millions of dollars that your allies on Wall Street and the political plutocracy have said they’re going to spend.”
But that money isn’t likely to match up with what Spitzer can spend. If he believes that equal spending is a laudable goal (and it is), why not just agree to Stringer’s mutual spending cap proposal? (To ensure that outside groups don’t tip the balance against Spitzer, they could include a clause, like Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren did last year, penalizing candidates when PACs run ads supporting them.)
Like Michael Bloomberg in 2001, Spitzer has used his wealth and name recognition to run from a distance, communicating through effective, well-produced TV commercials and national TV appearances, instead of doing much local, retail campaigning — also known as “talking to voters.”
Even Anthony Weiner has shown enough respect for voters to go straight to them, answering any questions that come his way at numerous events each day.
By contrast, with the notable exception of visits to African-American churches, Spitzer has rarely been found on the campaign trail. He “has essentially gone into hiding,” The Washington Post noted in a recent profile. “His campaign, run out of the gilded Fifth Ave. offices of his family’s real estate empire, gives short notice alerts about his rare appearances.”
This desire to evade a dialogue extends, quite naturally, to the circumstances of his resignation as governor.
Spitzer and his campaign have treated any mention of the fact that he broke the law and had to resign under the cloud of a potential federal investigation as a personal attack. Anytime Stringer brings this up, he is accused of being “desperate” and “negative.”
The sex scandal that temporarily ended Spitzer’s career shouldn’t disqualify him as a candidate. But to claim that Stringer is engaging in gutter politics by mentioning an event that had huge public consequences is odd from a man who made his name and career by prizing accountability.
(If Spitzer were running against someone who left office under these circumstances, do you really think he’d decline to raise it?)
In some ways, New Yorkers are shockingly lucky to have someone with the guts, intellect and progressive vision of Spitzer running to be their city controller.
But during this campaign, he has looked less like a leader standing up for the vulnerable than a rich bully trying to silence scrutiny of his past.
Once upon a time, Eliot Spitzer was the scourge of such people.
Zeff is the politics editor for Salon.com