Some Thoughts on Mr. Spitzer Last night I started wondering whether, in the matter of Eliot Spitzer, we weren't all repeating the rush-to-moral-judgment mistakes of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The questions, after all, felt so familiar. How could Silda have stood alongside him like that? How could a politician be so reckless, so arrogant? What could make a man in that position risk everything? What a bastard Eliot Spitzer must be....

As someone who was, at the time, pretty moralistic about Bill Clinton, then later came to regret that attitude, I wish we could remember some of the moral nuances that the country eventually arrived at, some of the insights about the connections between political success and personal desires.

How could Silda have stood alongside her cad of a husand? How could Eliot have cheated on her?

Well, who are we to say what goes on inside a marriage? Even as all the pundits tut-tut at Silda for standing by her man, unless we are privy to the inner life of Eliot Spitzer and Silda Wall, we simply can not judge. (And why is the impulse to judge apparently so much more powerful than the impulse to try to understand?)

As for Spitzer's carnal desires....well, this is a man who's clearly hugely ambitious, energetic, and driven. Is it so impossible that, as with JFK and Bill Clinton, men who embody these characteristics often find that they carry a proportionate amount of sexual desire inside them?

And isn't it possible, in a way, that we should want this from our leaders, because if they don't have that passion inside them, maybe they shouldn't be running one of the biggest states in the country?

I'm not saying there aren't plenty of better options, or that this is a simple black-and-white matter. On the contrary: I'm saying that maybe we need to calm down, take a deep breath, before we have this guy tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.

Now, please don't misunderstand me: I'm not sanctioning adultery, nor the use of prostitutes, particularly because governors shouldn't commit crimes, no matter how minor.

(Prostitution, so far as I can tell, only hurts people when it's illegal. And frankly, if I were a woman and you gave me a choice between, say, working in a coal mine or hooking at $5k an hour—extreme choice, I know, but you take the point—I might just take the $5k. I certainly wouldn't criticize those who did.)

(Second point: Shouldn't everyone who believes in abortion rights support legalized prostitution? How can one believe that you have the right to abort a fetus but not the right to sell your body for sex?)

What I am saying is that we shouldn't entirely judge Eliot Spitzer because of the way he treated his wife and kids. (The Times reports that she is actually urging him not to resign!) We should primarily consider him in terms of how good a governor he's been.

(Unfortunately, the answer to that is, not very good. But then, he was a pretty great state attorney general, and he was apparently visiting prostitutes at the time then, so there doesn't seem to be any negative correlation between Spitzer's sex life and his job performance.)

I'll cede that moral leadership is part of public life, and that it's important. But it isn't everything. There are plenty of great leaders who are personal hypocrites. Martin Luther King cheated on his wife, but we all think of him as a great man, and we are right to do so.

So Eliot Spitzer has socially and maritally inappropriate sexual desires. That isn't great.

But so did Bill Clinton. And while his successor, George W. Bush, doesn't seem to have that personal failing, which one would you prefer as president?  ¶ 6:58 AM