The scandal and the New York governor

John Podhoretz:

ELIOT Spitzer is through . . . or he's not.

The truth is, we don't know yet if he's going to survive the appalling scandal that has just torn his own office asunder.

In the past two days, the governor of New York either a) saved his political career or b) committed political suicide.

He either a) acted quickly to address a shocking misuse of governmental power by overly aggressive aides or b) engaged in a coverup of his own overly aggressive actions in that shocking misuse of governmental power.

He'll either a) survive to fight another day or b) be gone from office, either through resignation or impeachment, by the end of next year.

There's no middle ground here. He's either a) clean or b) toast.

Spitzer either was or wasn't involved in siccing the State Police on a political rival, leaking false intimations about the State Police's findings and blaming the investigation on a non-existent press inquiry.

Spitzer says he wasn't. And if he wasn't, then he's guilty only of placing his trust in genuinely bad people who placed their own political hungers - vested entirely in Spitzer's career as governor - over the most elementary understanding of fairness.

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What do we know about Eliot Spitzer?

We know that he has a history of threatening people with prosecution and ruination to get them to bow their head and scrape their knee to him.

We know that he's considered a control freak, a detail-oriented guy with a ceaseless attention to detail and the fine points of every case - and that this portrait of Spitzer is the one offered by his admiring supporters, not by his enemies.

If you trust what Spitzer's friends say about him, it would have been entirely out of character for Spitzer not to know what Communications Director Darren Dopp and others were doing in his name - especially considering that their target was the most powerful Republican in the state and that they were therefore playing a very dangerous high-stakes game.

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Spitzer has a bully personality that served him well in prosecuting cases. It appears to not be of benefit to him in the more political setting of governing. Two of his closest aids refused to talk in the AG's investigation. That does not help Spitzer's case. Remarkably, he finds himself a wounded leader early in an administration. I suspect he may see some of the same justice that he used against others.