Soccer Dad

Irony and the nyt

I often accuse the New York Times of failing to appreciate the irony of what they report. Sometimes what's reported and what is reality are so far removed from each other. So I give the editorial page of the grey lady credit for recognizing irony when they see it, especially because they were such big boosters of soon to be former Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Last year when it turned out that members of the Governor's staff had been using the state police to discredit political rival, Joseph Bruno. Here's how the Times reported it at the time:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s aides, including one of his closest advisers, improperly used the State Police to gather information about the governor’s chief rival, Joseph L. Bruno, the State Senate majority leader, in an effort to plant a negative story about Mr. Bruno and damage him politically, according to a report on Monday by the attorney general’s office.

Darren Dopp, the governor’s communications director, is accused of concocting a false story for why the information was being gathered.

Spitzer aides, chiefly his communications director, Darren Dopp, concocted a false story for why the information was being gathered, saying the governor’s office acted after receiving a press request seeking details of Mr. Bruno’s use of state aircraft, the report said.

Mr. Dopp later made misleading statements about the involvement of the governor’s office in the effort, the report indicates. The report concludes that Mr. Bruno’s use of the helicopters — on trips that included both political and legislative events — was proper.

Minutes after the report was made public, Mr. Spitzer announced he was suspending Mr. Dopp indefinitely without pay. He said he was also dismissing his liaison to the State Police, the assistant secretary for homeland security, William Howard, and moving him to an unspecified job outside the governor’s office.

In order to limit the political fallout, Gov. Spitzer expressed his regrets on the Op-ed page of the Times. That's recalled today as an Op-Classic, Eliot Spitzer on Ethical Principles.

On my first day in office, I brought my staff together and told them what our guiding principles must be: "First, we're going to fight for what we believe in. And second, we're going to maintain the highest ethical standards while doing it."

Over the past few weeks, two members of my administration forgot that second principle — creating an appearance that the State Police were being used inappropriately.

As soon as this became clear, we acted immediately and decisively, suspending one of my longtime advisers indefinitely and transferring the other out of the governor's office. These steps were not taken lightly. Both of these people have served New York with distinction for decades.

But the message was simple: even though they didn't break the law, they forgot what we were about, and that won't be tolerated.

There's something disquieting about Spitzer emphasizing that his aides did not break the law, when they were found to have made "false" and "misleading" statements. There's also something bothersome about this:

We can get bogged down in partisan politics that serve only to distract us from the business at hand — the kind of head-hunting that we're beginning to see for people in my administration who were cleared by these investigations.

Or we can move forward and pick up where we left off, addressing the long list of issues and challenges that matter to all New Yorkers — which are just as important today as they were last week.

In other words, members of my administration were just found to have abused the power of my office, but can't we just get past that?

Maybe if the governor had put "ethical standards" as his administration's first priority, his staff would have realized "fight[ing] for what we believe in" did not give them a carte blanche to do whatever they deemed necessary to accomplish their goals.

Spitzer's mention of "ethical standards" underscores principle 10 of John Heilemann's A Pants down Primer -

10. Hypocrisy bites. Maybe most obvious, but also perhaps the final nail in any hope of soldiering on for Spitzer, was the vast disparity between his public image and the reality revealed last week. For Clinton, the opposite was true. As one of his White House aides puts it, “Everyone had at least an inkling that something like Monica could happen.” And, weird as it may sound, this was a great blessing—for nothing is more damaging to any politician than his unmasking as a fraud. Because we’d all known all along that Clinton was a dog, we had little choice but to forgive him, because we were complicit. But nobody felt complicit in Spitzer’s fate. What they felt was duped. And in the end, that’s why he was doomed.

Perhaps that's the best explanation as to why Gov. Spitzer got so little slack. (Read the other 9 also, they're all bits of excellent speculation.)

eliot spitzer.