The Spitzer Meltdown

Could anyone have predicted this? Eliot Spitzer was the hard charging attorney general of New York who put fear into Wall Street and won admirers around the country. He easily won election as governor last year.

Now he's in a raucous battle with the legislture, suspending aides over abuse of state police and on his way to being a one-term flameout. It's a long way until 2010 and Spitzer can obviously pull out of this.

But when I was at Time magazine Spitzer was often talked about as being Time's Person of the Year and the idea of him running for president someday didn't seem like a crazy idea at all. He had that kind of golden sheen.

Instead of joining the pantheon of New York state governors--Roosevelt, Harriman, Rockefeller--he's looking like a joke.

It's tempting to say that the skills of being a good prosecutor--aggresiveness, dogged determination-- actually made him a bad governor but there's such a history of good prosecutors becoming good governors from Tom Dewey to Bruce Babbitt that it's hard to buy that as an explanation.