- Spitzer was never a self-doubter
It's no secret that Eliot Spitzer has had a difficult first year in office, much of it involving his aides’ involvement in an effort to tarnish Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, the state’s top Republican. But the NYT reports that Spitzer seemed to have rebounded, with Democrats poised to perhaps gain control of the state Senate for the first time in four decades. Now, of course, all bets are off. (Still no word on whether Spitzer intends to resign.) A New Yorker profile of Spitzer last December revealed, not surprisingly, a complex personality. "Spitzer is a lawyer, a logician, a tactician, a policy fanatic, but not a deep thinker or a self-doubter," wrote Nick Paumgarten.
He’s didactic. He says “Look” a lot. He’s a world-class square, but he can be funny and good-natured. His humor relies on mockery, of others and of himself, although his self-deprecations often end in self-aggrandizement. His stock “stupid story about missing class,” as he called it—about going back to Harvard Law School and being ribbed by two professors for not having ever gone to their lectures—ended with the punch line “Yeah, but has it hurt my career?” The most commonly heard criticism of him, which has dogged him at least since his days as attorney general, is that he is a bully, which encompasses not just professional aggression but also what many regard as a preening rectitude and a tendency toward intellectual arrogance.
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He comes from a family of achievers. His father, Bernard, and his mother, Anne, both the children of Jewish immigrants, grew up in cold-water flats on the Lower East Side. Bernard built a half-billion-dollar real-estate empire, consisting primarily of residential apartment buildings in Manhattan. Eliot, born in 1959, is the youngest of three children; his sister, the eldest, is a lawyer, and his brother is a neurosurgeon. The Spitzer clan is eccentric only in its heightened devotion to attainment and argument. On the spectrum of rich-kid gumption, he and his siblings are at the extreme end. They grew up in the Fieldston section of Riverdale, a well-to-do corner of the Bronx, where Eliot attended Horace Mann, a private school. It can seem churlish to call attention to a man’s privileged background, unless that man, either out of embarrassment or political expediency, takes pains to gloss over it. Spitzer sometimes makes more of his outer-borough credentials than any son of Riverdale should. During a dispute at a conference several years ago, the California attorney general challenged him to a fight, saying, “Let’s go—I’m from Oakland,” to which Spitzer replied, “Come on—I’m from the Bronx!”
The Spitzer family dinner table has become legendary. Bernie Spitzer was a demanding father, and he expected his children to come to supper with a topic for debate and a well-researched argument. “Conversation was a competitive sport,” William Taylor, Spitzer’s roommate at Princeton and a co-founder of the magazine Fast Company, told me. Taylor has said that he prepared harder for those dinners than he did for any of his classes. “Bernie Spitzer in his prime was both thrilling and terrifying,” he said. It was not an emotionally indulgent household, or a religious one. (The potential first Jewish President was not bar mitzvahed.)
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While at Harvard, Spitzer met Silda Wall, a fellow-student, on a ski trip to Vermont. Wall was from North Carolina and had recently been divorced, after a brief marriage to another law student. She and Spitzer married three years later, in 1987. They have three daughters, age twelve to seventeen. Silda worked for many years as a corporate lawyer at Skadden, Arps, then, with some misgivings, gave up her practice to look after the family and her husband’s political career. She brings a certain politesse to Team Spitzer. When I met her, she was resolutely composed and on message, except perhaps when talking about the family’s midsummer hike up Mt. Marcy, the state’s tallest peak. They ran out of water and, as she said, “we had not really thought out the food piece of this.” They live in one of Bernard Spitzer’s buildings, on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-ninth Street, a half block from the home of Michael Bloomberg, in an enclave of what you might call self-capitalized crossover political talent.
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| 11:56 AM Mar 10, 2008 | Email the Daily Dragon | Email this Article | Post Comments |
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