The Spitzer Mystery
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The big mystery in Albany is which Eliot Spitzer is going to show up in January to take over as governor. Is it going to be the hard-left Eliot Spitzer or the centrist Eliot Spitzer? The poser arises following a recent interview that Mr. Spitzer granted to his biographer, Brooke Masters, that was published in the Financial Times of London. In the first part of the interview, issued Monday, Mr. Spitzer was said by the newspaper to have “hit out at efforts by figures in the Bush administration and business to roll back corporate accountability reforms imposed in the wake of financial scandals such as Enron.”
The FT reported that Mr. Spitzer “pronounced himself suspicious of the push to revamp the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate accountability rules.” That is the hard-left Mr. Spitzer — even Senator Smoot Schumer and Mayor Bloomberg wrote an oped in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month saying Sarbanes-Oxley “needs to be re-examined” as part of the effort to keep London from surpassing New York as the world’s financial capital. In a second report on the interview, Mr. Spitzer is quoted as saying, “I’ll work to make sure the financial companies stay here,” adding, “We’re going to look at the tax code to make sure we’re not pushing capital elsewhere.” That was the centrist Mr. Spitzer.
Mr. Spitzer’s two personalities have played out through his history as politician and as the state attorney general. The hard-left Mr. Spitzer made Wall Street a target for his enforcement operations. But the centrist Mr. Spitzer disposed of cases not, for the most part, by sending businessmen to jail or by indicting entire companies and shutting them down, but rather by reaching settlement agreements that the hard-left critics complained were only a slap on the wrist.
The contradictions are evident in the press coverage Mr. Spitzer garnered. Mr. Spitzer won adulation from the hard-left Nation, whose Web site recommended him as a running mate for Senator Kerry in 2004 by saying that Mr. Spitzer is “the single most effective battler against corporate abuses in either political party,” “a watchdog on Wall Street and a fearless advocate for consumers” with “a great track record as a defender of women’s rights.” But Mr. Spitzer also got good press in the conservative Weekly Standard, which ran a cover article depicting him as Theodore Roosevelt, reporting that “There is no Democrat more in love with the conservative theory of the investor class” and quoting the money manager Jim Cramer describing Mr. Spitzer as “the most Republican Democrat I know … pro-growth.”
As the report released yesterday by the bipartisan, nongovernmental Committee on Capital Markets Regulation makes clear, how this is all resolved is going to make a big difference to the American economy and especially to New York’s. Wall Street is the engine of the New York City and New York State economy, and if the global finance industry moves to London and Hong Kong, this city and this state will be in big trouble. Rep. Gregory Meeks, a Queens Democrat, has taken up the cause of easing the regulatory burdens of audit compliance for small companies under Sarbanes-Oxley.
The committee whose report was released yesterday has impeccable credentials; it includes, among others, John Thornton, formerly of Goldman Sachs; Ira Millstein of Weil, Gotshal & Manges; and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia Business School. Mr. Spitzer financed his gubernatorial campaign with contributions from the city’s finance and real estate communities but also from the trial lawyers. They — and all New Yorkers — are waiting to see which Mr. Spitzer will show up to govern.