We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
There is nothing so damaging to the psyche as discovering that someone you’ve considered a hero turns out to be a human being like the rest of us. It is especially vexing to the spirit when the hero’s tragic flaw is a hypocritical one. As you have no doubt already heard, NY Governor Eliot Spitzer is "involved" in a prostitution ring. He’s issued a nebulous apology for familial wrongdoings.
Damn.
There goes my hero.
I understand that humans are tragically flawed creatures. Lord knows we’ve seen enough of them the last few years to last a lifetime. But there’s a difference between a scandal like Pete Rose, and one like Ted Haggard. Pete bet on baseball games, but he was never an anti-gambling crusader. Like many athletes, he was a thrill-seeker, and with his playing days behind him he sought thrills elsewhere. Ted Haggard, on the other hand, was a moralizing evangelist who preached loudly the joys of straight sex. Like many anti-gay Republicans, he sought his thrills in the very briar patch he warned others about.
Eliot Spitzer has been at times a lone voice of reason in the world of corporate corruption. When the prevailing wisdom was that CEO’s should be paid "whatever the market will bear," Spitzer rightly called it a thieves code. When mutual fund companies engaged in privileged transactions that the individual investor would never be privy to, Spitzer launched an investigation that caused the heads of Putnam, Alliance, and Strong to step down.
From John Entine with "Ethical Corporation Magazine":
"[He] has gone after General Electric for polluting New York's Hudson River, sued power companies in the Midwest for causing acid rain and even taken on Korean grocers for not paying the minimum wage. His campaign against corporate corruption accelerated when he forced the nation's largest investment firms, including Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, to pay more than a billion dollars in fines for putting out fraudulent investment advice. Here's a man who tilts at windmills and wins. In this age of Parmalat and Enron, where some of the world's top financial and accounting institutions looked the other way or themselves have their hand in the cookie jar, it's refreshing to find a law enforcement official who takes his public responsibilities seriously."
It didn’t take long for Wall Street to take notice that someone was being a bigger bully in their own playground. Industry executives and Republican representatives cried foul saying that Spitzer was usurping the power of the Federal government. Who was he trying to do the jobs of the SEC, the FTC, and the Republican Congress? His response was as flawless as it was accurate: "The system was rotten, and no one seemed interested in fixing it, so we moved in."
I work in the financial services industry, and I was without a doubt one of Eliot Spitzer’s biggest fans – but mine was a lonely world amongst my peers. Try though I might, I could never convince them that Spitzer was doing what the Bush administration was SUPPOSED to be doing. The more he was criticized by my peers, the more passionate I became about his defense. It was at this point (around 2004) that Eliot crossed that invisible line in my head. He wasn’t just a good AG. He was my paragon of virtue.
That was until today. Paragon’s of virtue can’t be married with kids and also involved in a high-class prostitute ring. And even though it’s not an "apples-to-apples" kind of scandal (unless, of course, banks were buying him prostitutes), it still casts a long shadow over his previous good deeds. When you’re a moral crusader (corporate or otherwise), you cannot succumb to immoral temptations.
Governor Spitzer’s administration was not without its problems. I was disappointed to see his various stumbles, mistakes, and false starts during his first term. Perhaps it was an illustration of the Peter Principle in action – that we are all at some point in our careers promoted to the level of our incompetence. I had hoped he would be able to right the ship of state, but now I just hope he can right the ship of his person life.
In the meantime, as the Bard (or was it Dave Grohl?) once said:
There goes my hero. Watch him as he goes.
There goes my hero. He’s ordinary.