Interview

Not too long ago, Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York State once thought to be a rising force in the Democratic Party, appeared destined to have the word disgraced attached to his epitaph. In March 2008, Spitzer resigned from office after an FBI investigation revealed that he had been a patron of a high-end prostitution service called Emperors Club VIP-the governor was blithely identified as "Client 9." In his resignation speech, Spitzer apologized to the people of New York State for his "private failings" and announced that he would step down to focus on making amends with his family. Shortly thereafter, the now-former governor, his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, and their three daughters returned to their apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side as Spitzer's career in public office-which had begun so promisingly a decade earlier when he was elected the state's attorney general-came to an end.

About a year ago, though, Spitzer slowly began to reenter the public sphere. He started writing a column on the economy for Slate. And he began giving interviews, addressing the scandal that ended his term-he has never quite moved beyond "private failings"-but also answering questions about some of the systemic problems that led to the current economic collapse and how the government needed to address the culture of Wall Street and financial institutions in general. What made Spitzer uniquely qualified to address these issues was his own history with the subject: While he was still attorney general, he had sued AIG, claiming that the insurance giant (which has since imploded) was using deception and fraud to boost its stock price; he had taken on Merrill Lynch, accusing the firm's analysts of offering investment advice tainted by gross conflicts of interest; and he had challenged the entire structure of the banking and financial-services industry itself, arguing for greater accountability and cautioning, somewhat presciently, that the predatory lending practices of mortgage companies, unchecked proprietary trading, and certain highly leveraged investment products (those infamous credit default swaps, for example) could lead us down a potentially dark, dangerous road.

The hard-charging aggression with which Spitzer prosecuted financial institutions-as well as environmental polluters and pharmaceutical companies-while he was New York State attorney general played a big role in his sweeping victory in the 2006 gubernatorial election. (Interview even ran a story on him that year under the heading: "He's gunning to be the next governor of New York-and he's just getting started!") Spitzer's run was fueled heavily by the image that he was a populist crusader, even though he himself came from a world of privilege: His father, 85-year-old Bernard Spitzer, is a self-made Manhattan real estate baron, and the younger Spitzer attended Princeton and earned his law degree from Harvard, where, in 2005, he delivered a now semi-ironic graduation address during which he warned the leaving class about the dangers of hubris and referenced Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.

Spitzer had run into difficulties as governor, though, before the prostitution scandal even hit. He had become a divisive force among state politicians after running on a reformative pledge to "change the ethics of Albany." Upon his swearing in, he was met with immediate resistance when the state legislature rebuffed his choice for a new comptroller. His campaign to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses crashed and burned. He also became embroiled in what would come to be known as Troopergate, when he was alleged to have abused his authority by ordering state police to create records tracking Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's whereabouts, which were then released to the media. (The governor's office was later cleared of any wrongdoing.) The prostitution scandal that forced Spitzer to resign is not the kind of thing that ever fully recedes from memory, but the history of American public life is filled with second acts-and Spitzer appears to be in the early stages of crafting one for himself, even if his days running for political office are behind him (and many aren't sure that they are). I met him on a recent Friday at his father's office in midtown Manhattan, which looks north toward Central Park and has served as his base of operations since he resigned as governor. We sat at a table in the corner, and he fixed himself a cup of coffee.

STEPHEN MOOALLEM: Over the last year, you've kind of slowly reentered public life. And while
the conversation early on obviously focused on the prostitution scandal that caused you to resign, you've very quickly emerged as a sort of reasoned voice on some of the issues that we're facing with the economy and the recession. How would you characterize your reentry into that arena?

ELIOT SPITZER: You know, I wouldn't characterize it... I would very honestly just tell you that what I tried to do was simply respond to inquiries from people as they came in. Where I've thought I could say something useful, I've tried to add a voice that was, frankly, a dissident voice earlier on, but one that I think has become a more mainstream voice-and not because I've shifted. I think that the critique I had of what was going on in our financial system from six, eight years ago-after seeing some of what we've suffered through and even since the cataclysm itself-in terms of the structural changes... I don't want to suggest causation, but some of what I was saying at the time, which was then viewed as a bit edgy, perhaps-that is now the perspective of people like Paul Volcker [former chairman of the Federal Reserve and current chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board] and Mervyn King [economist and governor of the Bank of England] in terms of how we need to fundamentally change the banking system. So all I've tried to do is answer some questions. I don't have any particular expertise-I've never been a banker or an investment banker. But I did see an evolution in the system that I thought was problematic.