Eliot Spitzer is coming back. To some of us that’ll read as a rallying cry for justice. To others it’ll seem the tag line to a horror movie. I feel a little of both. But the case I want to make here is why we need to get over those feelings – or at least beyond them – and make sure that Spitzer is not just back, but back in a real way, and – some day soon – with real power again.
Look, I can hold up the same list everyone will: What he did was disgusting; it was illegal; it caused great pain to his family; it supported a facet of society that victimized women; it gave NY State Gov. Paterson; it took away from America the possibility of a Spitzer Presidency, that would have promised to be bold in a way I’m not sure I’ll ever see.
But can we agree to agree about all of that, and shake our heads in mutual fury/contempt/sadness/whatever, and move on and forward? Not past Spitzer, but with him. And not for Eliot Spitzer’s sake, but maybe for the sake of the Democratic Party, and definitely for the sake of the country.
Let’s take Spitzer first: I don’t know the man. Beyond an empathy I can feel for any human who goes through any fall (no matter what they’ve done to cause it), I don’t care about the man. I do care about what he accomplished, what promise he showed, and what he might have been able to do for me and my country – might still be able to do if we give him a chance.
He’s asking for it. Not directly, but just by his presence out there. The first interview he gave after stepping down was to Farid Zacharia. You can watch part 1 of it here:
In it he talks about the biggest issue our country is facing right now – more than just the economic collapse; the remaking of our economy that it reveals as necessary – in a way that’s as smart as anyone I’ve yet seen. That should be no surprise.
Check out the intro that Rachel Maddow gives him in this recent interview:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
With a man who has done all that, whose bio is so perfectly suited for what we need in a leader now, who wouldn’t expect him to be as well versed as anyone out there in this stuff? But notice anything else? There are plenty of smart folks out there who get this stuff, but there are very few talking as tough about it (Krugman an exception) and as hard-minded and clear-eyed about what needs to be done. And there is virtually nobody who has the kind of resume he does that can back that tough talk up.
And toughness here is important. Because, while I am a huge supporter of President Obama (worked for the campaign in PA, donated lots…etc – all those bonifides) and I’m also tremendously pleased and proud of how he’s acted as President so far, there’s one thing he has shown clearly that he’s not: a pugilist.
Good. He doesn’t need to be. He shouldn’t be. He’s doing just the right thing.
But we – Americans, Democrats, Liberals especially – need someone to fill that role. Someone whose voice can do that punching so that Obama is pushed in the directions he wants to go (remember FDRs admonition: “make me”). No one could do that on the economy in the way Spitzer can. With him leading a charge, we could get the chance we need. And, in this instance, Obama – and his economic team – is showing that, without someone pushing like Spitzer would, we probably won’t get that true and radical and necessary change.
But that’s not the only aspect of the country that needs radical change. Which brings me to the most important point I want to make:
We – I’m talking about this country – have to somehow get out from under the tabloid take-downs and character destruction (whether is assassination or suicide is, really, immaterial). If FDR or JFK or MLK or any number of great leaders were subjected to the kind of scrutiny and attention to their personal lives (I’m talking media/public attention, not FBI here) that our contemporary media dishes out, we would have lost out on the accomplishments of these men. And for what? So we – the public – can get our entertainment fix? So we can gnash our teeth and shake our heads and feel superior? Why do we even want to know? We do we even care?
Because, in the end, it’s the public’s need for their news, and for their public servants, to serve as entertainment – and then to judge when the entertainment aspects don’t jibe with the policy and news aspects…then we judge the entertainment/personal aspects to be of more weight.
Listen, I’m a novelist. I write fiction. I bring that up only because the one thing all fiction writers must know, or must learn – the most important thing that fiction teaches readers, too – is that people are fallible. People have darkness in them. People do bad things. People hurt other people. And they rise above it sometimes, and they sink below it sometimes. And they struggle, always.
To expect our politicians to be different, is not only foolish – it’s dangerous and damaging.
And there is no better way to move beyond this curse that came to the fore most powerfully with the impeachment trial of President Clinton – and ruined, in many ways, a presidency that could have been far greater than it was – there is no better way to get past it than to take it head on and take a recent example of it and say, this: “You know what? We’re bigger than that. We care more about the real stuff than that. We – us in the Democratic party, especially – are going to be adults. We’re going to see the complexities like serious-minded adults. And we’re going to focus on what really matters.”
That why I say it’s not Spitzer that matters. It’s not his re-emergence. It’s the fact that that emergence – if we support it – can help get the country to a place where the kind of personalized political news that has so damaged this country in the past, can be left in the past.
I, for one, would love to see an America where a person like Spitzer – talented, brilliant, tough-minded, experienced, on the right side of justice, and, yes, who has, at least once, been a goddamned bastard and let his morals slip (who among us has not?) – could some day be President.