Spitzer Shock

Editorial of The New York Sun | August 30, 2006

No sooner had Air Spitzer been grounded than the attorney general-cum-gubernatorial candidate found himself caught in an electrical storm. Eliot Spitzer has said that from now on he'll pay full price for flights in private jets, as the law has required all along. Mr. Spitzer had previously attempted to take cover behind a haze of technicalities to obscure his campaign's troubles with state lobbying and campaign finance laws when it comes to air transportation, as our Jacob Gershman has reported over the past week. Then the lightning started. The electrical storm centers on the fact, reported by the Associated Press, that Mr. Spitzer accepted a $50,000 campaign donation from the company proposing to build a 200-mile electricity transmission line into Westchester. New York Regional Interconnect wrote the check to Mr. Spitzer's gubernatorial war chest on Christmas Eve in 2003.

Well, wouldn't you know, but the Office of the Attorney General now happens to be involved in the project as one of the state agencies exercising oversight. We harbor no animus to NYRI. We've suggested that the transmission line would be a good move given the defaults by the city and state government in failing to assist or permit efforts to build local power generation facilities in New York City. Nor do we accept the theory that campaign contributions of any size from anyone are inherently corrupt. By our lights, too little private money goes into political campaigns. We see campaign money is just another form of speech that is — or ought to be — protected by the First Amendment.

What bothers New Yorkers instead is the confounded hypocrisy. The attorney general has spent the last five years casting himself as a crusader against conflicts of interest, especially on Wall Street. Yet he has gleefully accepted campaign donations that would appear to create all kinds of conflicts of interest. He has accepted thousands of dollars from a few hedge fund managers even while he was investigating their peers or competitors. He accepted $30,000 in cutrate private flights from a lobbyist who will have a big chunk of gambling business before the next governor. Now come to find out he has accepted a ladle of $50,000 from a company that already has business before his current office.

What has been Mr. Spitzer's response? He has offered the kind of defense that he was always so unwilling to accept from his Wall Street victims — that the activity in question is technically legal. In respect of his decision not to pay for flights he has already taken, a spokeswoman for Mr. Spitzer, Christine Anderson, told an AP reporter, "The Spitzer campaign has followed the letter of the law when it comes to reimbursement for air travel." A Bank of America broker, Theodore Sihpol, followed the letter of the law in respect of mutual fund trading, but that didn't stop Mr. Spitzer from hauling the banker into an expensive trial before a jury rendered an acquittal. At least in Mr. Sihpol's case the legality defense was true. Mr. Spitzer, in contrast, appears to have adopted what can only be called a generous reading of the statute.

Likewise the Spitzer camp's reaction to the NYRI disclosure: "The contributions were made well before the attorney general's office became involved in the proceedings," Ms. Anderson has said. Well, General Spitzer was never as forgiving of his victims as Candidate Spitzer is of himself. Big campaign donations and accusations of pay-to-play may be par for the course in politics, but "pay-to-play" isn't the issue here. It's the low criticality.The danger to him is not any "stench of corruption" that might exude from the shocking discovery that a politician accepted a large donation. It is the establishment of a double standard that raises the bar beyond the law for Wall Street and lowers the bar beneath the law for Mr. Spitzer himself.

Correction from August 31, 2006:

The New York Sun erred in reporting in an editorial on page 8 yesterday that Attorney General Spitzer's gubernatorial campaign received $50,000 in 2003 from New York Regional Interconnect Inc., a company that is attempting to build a 200-mile electricity transmission line to Westchester from Utica and that currently has business before the attorney general's office. The contribution was made by New York Interconnect LLC, an unrelated company that is a subsidiary of Cablevision. The Associated Press, which issued the erroneous report on which the editorial was based, killed its story after our editorial was put to bed, and we failed to catch it.

Neither NYRI nor the $50,000 donation were, in and of themselves, the point of our editorial, which focussed on the response offered by the Spitzer camp to the AP reporter before it became clear there had been a mix-up. A Spitzer spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, had been quoted as saying, "The contributions were made well before the attorney general's office became involved in the proceedings." That struck us then, as now, as inadequate for a candidate who has expended so much time and so much of the taxpayers' money pursuing others for "conflicts of interest" less glaring than the one that was alleged yesterday afternoon.

Questions still confront Mr. Spitzer, as the $50,000 came from a subsidiary of Cablevision, yet another of Mr. Spitzer's campaign donors that has done business with his office before. As the Capitol Connection Web log of the Albany Times-Union reports,Mr.Spitzer received at least $18,000 from at least two Cablevision executives for his 2002 re-election bid. Less than five months after that election, Mr. Spitzer personally helped broker a deal between Cablevision and the YES Network to bring Yankees games to New York households.