One of the more effective, albeit disingenuous, narratives of the American left goes something like this: The business community is evil and must be punished for the sins it has committed or may yet commit.
Its popularity on the left is growing, egged on by President Obama, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and radical Sen. Elizabeth Warren — even at times by Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
But they weren’t the ones who mainstreamed it. No, I’m afraid the modern equivalent of this demagoguery comes from a darker, more ambitious and more volatile place: the mind of Eliot Spitzer.
Yes, the former New York governor and state attorney general — when he was known as the “Sheriff of Wall Street” — has been in the news a lot the last couple of days after police responded to a complaint that he allegedly choked Svetlana Travis, 25, at the Plaza Hotel over the weekend. Spitzer denied the choking incident, and Travis has left the country for her native Russia without filing charges.
Whatever you make of this episode (the woman is less than half his age with an apparently spotty employment record), it’s fair to say it isn’t Spitzer’s lone lapse of judgment. Aside from his crazy behavior as governor (remember how he was accused of using state police to spy on a political opponent?), who can forget the reason he was ultimately forced out of office: a federal sting operation that caught him having sex with a hooker in Washington, DC.
This rendezvous, as I pointed out in this paper back in 2013, was paid for in part by New York’s taxpayers because the ex-gov muscled his way into a congressional subcommittee meeting and used state resources to cover his travel expenses.
(Spitzer paid for the hooker himself.)
But these are mere symptoms of Spitzer’s larger disorder: recklessness that manifests itself not just in his personal life, but in his professional one as well, where he continually pursued political prosecutions against all reasonable evidence.
This is something voters should consider whenever they hear Warren or Sanders parrot their Spitzer-inspired bile on the campaign trail, or when another ambitious prosecutor looks to make his political bones on the backs of the business community with nebulous evidence.
Or if Spitzer, as he did just a couple of years ago, attempts to return to public life.
Of course, Spitzer didn’t invent the idea of using Wall Street prosecutions as a springboard to higher office. Indeed, the great Mayor Rudy Giuliani used that playbook as US attorney and we were lucky to have him.
But Spitzer did reach new heights in his self-aggrandizement and new lows in basing many of his prosecutions as attorney general on nebulous evidence that resulted in failed cases — something that has become a benchmark for the left ever since.
On his watch, there were lots of press conferences and left-wing media adulation as he threw mud at his targets — but none of his top white-collar bad guys went to jail. Those who fought back often had success.
Maybe the most blatant example came in 2005 when Spitzer accused Hank Greenberg of using shady accounting to gin up profits at the insurer he ran, AIG. Forget for a moment that Greenberg denied the charges and the numbers involved were picayune; the hoopla eventually forced Greenberg to resign and sent the company into management disarray.
Spitzer didn’t seem to care. He used the AIG case to propel himself into the governor’s mansion in 2007 while taking to the airwaves to label Greenberg a “fraud” even before filing any charges.
Eventually, a far worse financial calamity would hit AIG. The new, Greenberg-less management ramped up so much risk at AIG, the company’s insolvency became one of the triggers for the 2008 financial crisis.
And as for the case against Greenberg: It exists as a shell of what Spitzer initially brought, with nearly all the charges having been dropped. The 90-year-old Greenberg maintains his innocence and has sued Spitzer for libel, for good measure.
As far as I’m concerned, the tribulations of Spitzer’s personal life are a mere symptom of a broader dysfunction of reckless, ends-justify-the-means politicking that, I’m afraid, is here to stay.
Thank you, Eliot.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.