NY Governor Spitzer’s Aides Used Police for Political Ends

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer,a Democrat, has been locked in a battle royal with State Senate GOP Leader Joe Bruno, a man who has been in office long enough to have no scruples left. The state attorney general, Andrew Cuomo (a Democrat), charged on Monday that two of the governor’s aides misused state police to plant a story about Mr. Bruno’s travel shenanigans. The governor has apologized, suspended one of his staff and reassigned another. It’s not enough because the incident has destroyed the governor’s reputation as a clean politician who was going to clean up Albany.

New York City’s biggest circulation paper, The Daily News, reported that the state troopers “were asked to gather details about Bruno’s travels so they could be fed to the Albany Times Union for a story about the senator using state aircraft for political trips.” The paper also said Governor Spitzer in his apology that the troopers “should never have been put in this situation.” The investigation didn’t include an interview of the governor as it seems he was unaware of the whole affair, or if one prefers, AG Cuomo is giving the governor protection of a partisan nature.

Mr. Bruno knows how to fight back when threatened; he had someone else do it. The Daily News also reported state Republican Party boss Joseph Mondello as saying, “This disturbing abuse of power by a governor is unprecedented. The public needs to know when Gov. Spitzer was aware of this blatant setup attempt and what the governor’s role was in its execution.” It’s Howard Baker time, “what did the president know and when did he know it?”

No laws were broken by either side. If Mr. Bruno had taken helicopter rides for purely personal business, the state and nation would be rid of him. The AG’s report, though, says he always mixed some legislative business into the personal side of his trips; the report says the rules should be tightened. By the same token, it seems that using the police to get dirt on a rival to turn it over to the press isn’t illegal in New York state, or the governor’s aides would be under indictment.

The Spitzer administration is now snake-bit. The rich-kid turned-avenger-of-injustice is now just another politician. He’s managed to make Mr. Bruno look good, and that usually takes months of planning. The Daily News editorial on the matter should be burned into the mind of every good-government politician and would-be statesman, “So it goes as Eliot Spitzer discovers - to his naive surprise - that you can be smart, which he certainly is, and right, which he often is, without also being wise in how you go about advancing your causes. In fact, you can be pig-headedly, self-righteously dumb.” And from there, it is but a short walk to ineffectiveness.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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