All Politics is Local: Spitzer's Fall from Grace

I have decided this morning to come down from my usual Olympian heights and comment on a local political event. It seems that here in New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi has been caught spending $80,000 of the taxpayers' funds on limousine service for his ailing wife. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer decided that the appropriate response to the criminal behavior of his political crony is forgiveness. With a fifty percent lead in the polls in his "race" for Governor of our fair state, Spitzer must be feeling a bit Olympian himself. Hevesi's behavior should have generated a speech from Spitzer along the lines of, "Much as I had come to respect Comptroller Hevesi and his acknowledged efforts on the part of the people of New York, his theft of city services requires me to ask for a criminal indictment." So far, this has not occurred, and given Spitzer's lack of an immediate response along these lines, an indictment will come too late to change the fact that he has revealed his clay feet even before taking office as governor. (Even if not too late to apprehend a corrupt politician.) That fifty percent lead in the polls, Eliot, is not an index of how much people love you or how charming they find you. It is not about love and you don't give off much charm. It is a vote for a style of governance that many citizens feel they see all too rarely in an era of deepening corruption by fat corporate types. It is, in other words, a self-congratulatory vote for having the perspicacity to find in your persona as Attorney General an honest man who will go after the bad guys. The people are so desperate for such governance that they even chose to turn a blind eye to the unbridled ambition that you manifest from the very first day you appeared on the political scene, yet another rich guy buying himself a political office. Try to get this straight, Eliot, the people who are voting for you are not voting for you as an individual but as an agent of their desire for decency. Do not make the mistake others before you have of misreading the true nature of your "popularity" and giving yourself carte blanche to pardon the wrongdoing of your political allies.