Four and one-half dozen men have served as governor of New York State. All kinds of men. Brilliant men and bland men, with many different motives, visions and legacies. Seven of these men did not complete one of their terms, one time because of death, but only two men have been relieved of their duties in dishonor. William Sulzer was impeached and removed from office in 1913, and now Eliot Spitzer, who hit his own eject button on the day before this is being written.
After the incredible story broke and developed, it became clearer and clearer almost every hour that there would be no Hugh Grant moment with Jay Leno, no laughs to break the tension, to begin a process of reacquaintance with someone many of us once wanted to succeed. Eliot Spitzer used up people's tolerance last year. He was already the boss that everyone hates to work for. Now he's the guy you don't want hanging around with your husband or wife.
Many of us are in information overload. I can only hope that by the time you read this, the media has been distracted and moved past ridiculous obsession with the young woman, the wife, the daughters and left these people alone. It's all so draining.
Thirteen months ago, five weeks after Mr. Spitzer became Governor, I wrote a column with a warning. The Governor's relationship with legislative leaders had degraded at alarming speed, and the way he was behaving and going about his job was threatening his ambitious reform agenda. And there were really stunning similarities to the forgotten Governor Sulzer, another famous man who saw himself as an irresistible force for good, on a higher mission against the lower animals. The parallels between the two are now more than noticeable; they are absolutely eerie.
William Sulzer, whose life and career have been a puzzle that I have tried to solve for some years, was more famous than Eliot Spitzer was when swept into office. Assuming office with great fanfare and national interest, a booming start soon devolved into a brutal war of words with legislators. Sulzer and Spitzer were always smarter than all of us, and used similar words to describe opposition and its motives. Both tried to use public opinion as a bludgeon to get their way against the state's most powerful forces, forces which better understood the application of raw power and the art of choosing winnable fights.
Publicly spirited citizens were greatly conflicted. Here was a governor with increasingly glaring personal flaws and some dark secrets articulating desperately needed, greatly desired change. In opposition was a distasteful political establishment fighting for its way of life.
Sulzer, in particular, believed public opinion made him invincible. He charged others with financial malfeasance knowing that private detectives were looking into every aspect of his own life, and as a massive campaign to humiliate and weaken him was well under way. He was already wounded when investigators found discrepancies in his 1912 campaign finance report, and impeached him the next day. He was removed after a true Trial of the Century. Most voters believed that Sulzer was guilty, but that his removal was unacceptable payback and punishment for defiance. What Spitzer did was just unacceptable.
In both cases, the rationales behind the political careers of both men, men with white hats on white stallions, were no longer valid in the eyes of most New Yorkers. Political tragedies.
As the dust was still settling from the Sulzer affair, most legislators figured out it was best to keep their mouths shut and do their jobs. They even passed Sulzer's bill creating primaries for statewide offices, the bill that sparked the final massive battle, word for word. Maybe legislators today will take that precedent to heart, and will do their business without misinterpreting one man's personal flaws as any lack of need for the agenda he was promoting.
