If you’re looking for a hawk among the Democrats, you might want to head west to Chautauqua, N.Y., where tomorrow a speech will be given by a young governor who is said to have described himself in private as more hawkish than President Bush and who, though he is down at the moment, there can be no doubt has his eye set on becoming the first Jewish president of the United States.

Your correspondent speaks, of course, of Eliot Spitzer, who will be delivering a morning lecture at one of the most famous talking spots in American history, the Chautauqua Institution. I don’t know whether or not he will strike a hawkish line.

The institution’s theme of the week is “security and preparedness,” centering on the question of how democratic societies can protect themselves from terrorism while maintaining an open civil society.

Mr. Spitzer, who shares the stage in Albany with Joseph Bruno and Sheldon Silver, is sandwiched between a talk by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and one by a former Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor.

Preoccupied with his skirmishes with Mr. Bruno and the problems of the Empire State, Mr. Spitzer has been largely a spectator of the national foreign policy debate. Occasionally, Mr. Spitzer exposes flashes of opinion on the subject and they illuminate a mind that is clearly engaged in worldly affairs and not wedded to conventional Democratic thinking.

Speaking at the Princeton Colloquium on Public and International Affairs in April, Mr. Spitzer, who seemed so comfortable behind the Ivy League lectern far removed from Albany, spoke of “gilded-age values” and the formation of a “barbell society” in a time of globalization.

On Iraq, Mr. Spitzer has sharply attacked President Bush for his handling of the occupation but, unlike the Democratic presidential candidates, he hasn’t explicitly called for an end to the war.

In May, Mr. Spitzer, at a lunch session sponsored by the Associated Press, addressed the issue of Iraq war funding in a way that managed to take swipes at both the president and Congress. “It is an embarrassment before the nation, before the world, that we cannot pass a budget that funds our troops, that ensures their safety and their security, but the president should understand the public tolerance for this war has run its course,” the Associated Press quoted Mr. Spitzer as saying.

In November 2006, during a televised debate against his Republican opponent, John Faso, Mr. Spitzer was asked if he thought the war was a mistake. “Because of the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, I supported removing Saddam Hussein from power, but, as everyone now knows, we were lied to and I believe the war effort has been drastically mismanaged,” he replied, according to an Associated Press transcript.

Given the opportunity to denounce the war, Mr. Spitzer has so far restricted his criticism to the president’s management without saying his initial support for the war was a mistake.

In a July 2006 debate against his Democratic challenger, Thomas Suozzi, Mr. Spitzer was asked whether Washington should set a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Mr. Spitzer, along with Mr. Suozzi, said he was opposed to a timetable.

In June of 2003, Mr. Spitzer surprised the national Democratic establishment by declaring to a Plattsburgh newspaper that Howard Dean could not win the 2004 presidential election because Mr. Dean opposed the Iraq war. “The American people will not elect somebody who opposed a war that they supported,” Mr. Spitzer reportedly said. In March of that year, Mr. Spitzer was quoted as saying: “Removing Saddam Hussein is just and necessary for world peace.”

It might seem strange for Mr. Spitzer to turn to subjects of national security and civil society at a time when attention is in Albany fixated on his administration’s scheming against Mr. Bruno.

On Thursday, the attention will reach a new peak when Senate Republicans hold a public committee meeting with the attorney general’s office and the inspector general’s office to discuss their investigations and their findings.

A cynic would say that Mr. Spitzer is simply trying to change the subject to avoid further embarrassment. That may be the case, but the fact is that Mr. Spitzer has never shown himself to be comfortable or content with thrashing his way through the brawl of state politics. It’s not in his DNA.

If one looks at the video of Mr. Spitzer speaking at Princeton (a Web cast is at www.princeton.edu/pcpia/webcasts.html), one gains the sense of a politician who misses his old job as attorney general and yearns to once again talk about big ideas.

Tomorrow, expect to see a governor who isn’t hiding but a cerebral political leader doing what he does best, miles and miles away from Albany.