Spitzer’s done

Eliot Spitzer’s political career is over. The New York Governor might not have resigned yet but it is impossible to see how he can recover from the revelation that he was a client of an expensive prostitution service.

The problem for Spitzer is not just that he has been caught in a sex scandal but that he has based his political career on his own integrity; without it, he is nothing. Just to compound the problem, what alerted law enforcement to Spitzer’s activities was a series of suspicious financial transactions making it impossible to depict this as a purely private, sexual matter.

Spitzer’s fall has been as dramatic as his rise. A string of high-profile prosecutions of corporate wrongdoers as New York Attorney General vastly raised his profile and made him a formidable political player in the post-Enron era; they were even those who touted him as the ideal running mate for John Kerry in 2004.