Eliot Spitzer has a lesson to pass along

Barely a year after being forced to resign as New York governor amid derision and fury over his identification as “Client 9” of a prostitution ring, Eliot Spitzer is back in the public arena -- not as an elected official but as a pundit.

In what has become an increasingly familiar ritual among American public figures who’ve fallen from grace, Spitzer has embarked on a public rehabilitation process through the media.

Since December, Spitzer has been writing a regular column for Slate, the left-leaning online journal; he’s also turned up in other media forums and is scheduled for an appearance today on NBC’s “Today” show.

The man once known as the “Sheriff of Wall Street” for his pursuit of corporate malfeasance while New York attorney general is training his columnist’s eye primarily on the failings of Manhattan’s moneyed institutions and sounding alarms about what he sees as America’s inadequate response to the economic meltdown.

His writings have drawn considerable attention, and at least one journalist has called for Spitzer to return to public service, a proposition that would’ve been virtually unthinkable last spring.

“At a certain level, obviously, or maybe not so obviously, I do love the substance of politics, the policy debate,” Spitzer said by phone this week. “And at a moment where we’re, I think it’s fair to say, in some state of crisis economically, I have an urge to try to participate and contribute in some small way if I can.

“I’m taking this really one step at a time. I enjoy writing. Earlier in my career most of the writing I did was as a lawyer, which is, as you can imagine, rather turgid and not as snappy as journalistic writing.”

Since Spitzer began penning his Slate column, his views have won praise from predominantly moderate and liberal media quarters, including Newsweek and the New York Times, and he has appeared on television and radio talk shows. “Welcome back, Mr. ex-Governor,” saluted a New York Observer article taking note of the recent “Spitzer boomlet.”

One Slate column, headlined “The Real AIG Scandal,” in which Spitzer argued that the funneling of the company’s bailout money to large investment houses was a bigger “disgrace” than the insurance giant’s payment of bonuses to its workers, drew particular attention.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, went so far in print as to suggest Spitzer as a potential replacement for recently embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

“Call me crazy,” she wrote. “But he [Spitzer] foresaw the bubbles and disasters resulting from deregulatory frenzy . . . .”

From the other side of the political spectrum, the conservative Weekly Standard has lamented Spitzer’s resurgence as a sign of how public figures no longer are required to serve lengthy penances for their misdeeds.

He’s not alone

Spitzer is only one of several elected officials and public figures who in the last few years have been resurrected as media analysts after being banished to the political wilderness or, in the case of hot-tempered former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, the fringes of the NCAA. And the phenomenon appears to be a bipartisan one.

The growing list of such figures includes William Bennett, the former U.S. Education secretary and public moralist who admitted a passion for high-stakes gambling and is now a TV pundit; the tantrum-throwing Knight, a sometime television analyst; Newt Gingrich, the onetime House speaker who was disciplined by Congress for ethical wrongdoing but has since returned as a leading conservative consultant; and Henry Blodget, who left Wall Street under a cloud after being barred from the securities industry for life for allegedly committing securities fraud and now runs a consulting firm and writes for Slate, among others.

One of those who played a role in precipitating Blodget’s flight from Wall Street was Spitzer, who as attorney general published e-mails in which Blodget denigrated stocks that he had touted in public.

In an interview, Slate Editor David Plotz said that Spitzer’s column venture had grown out of the former governor’s longtime friendship with Cliff Sloan, Slate’s former publisher, which dates to the men’s days together as Harvard University law students. Plotz said Spitzer also was friendly with Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor in chief of the Slate Group, a unit of the Washington Post Co.

“Eliot was thinking about what he should do and Jacob knew what a smart guy he was,” said Plotz, who described Spitzer as “brilliant and prescient” in anticipating some of the causes of the current economic downturn.

Plotz acknowledged that he and Weisberg had talked about whether Spitzer’s scandal-plagued past would keep readers from taking him seriously as a moral authority on financial issues.

“But honestly we felt he’s a guy who’s incredibly smart, who as a politician had really amazing ideas,” Plotz said. “Whatever the circumstances were of Eliot’s fall, they have nothing to do with his ideas about the relation of government and Wall Street.”

Plotz said that, given the world’s present economic straits, people are eager to hear possible remedies from a variety of sources.

‘I’m very conscious’

While his bosses insist that Spitzer’s past problems have no bearing on his analytical credentials, the ex-governor affirmed that he had been concerned about whether readers would accept him.

“Look, I’m very conscious of what I have been through, and what I did, and I hope that the public will be receptive to my ideas,” he said. “And I think I’ve tried to be properly conscious of the context in which I write, as I’ve presented myself.”

Asked whether his desire to write was born of frustration that he no longer could shape the public realm directly, he replied: “I can understand why you phrase it that way. I guess I would say it this way: I wanted to be part of the policy debate in one shape or another for many years. I was lucky enough to have, for the better part of a decade, a formal role in government, and now that I don’t, yes, I’d still like to participate in some way.”

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said that, “the 10 million blogs notwithstanding,” there are “very few people with the kind of credentials” and expertise capable of furnishing insight into the enormous problems confronting the nation.

Figures like Spitzer and Bennett are in demand as analysts because the public perceives their qualifications as outweighing their wrongdoing and because of the sheer proliferation of media outlets over the years, he said.

“I think this says less about some fundamental change in the mores of American life and more about the fact that there are just so many venues that need opinion and need people talking on them,” Thompson said.

“I suppose there are limits to that. I don’t suppose we’re ever going to see O.J. Simpson back in a TV booth. And that isn’t to say he doesn’t have insights about football.”

David Marshall, a professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia who has written extensively about celebrity culture, said that there had been “a kind of acceleration” in the ability of public figures who’ve been brought low to reenter public discourse in a relatively short amount of time.

Marshall said the commodification of celebrities, including politicians, made them valuable assets in the media culture, whether their names have “a positive or a negative connotation.”

In addition, he said, the public may judge Spitzer less harshly today, in relative terms, than it did a year ago because of the many recent examples of “dramatic wrong done by people in the banking sector.”

Discussing other former politicians and public figures who’ve rebounded from a major career reversal by carving out a role within the mass media, Plotz cited Al Gore. “Al Gore is a politician whose political career ended in this kind of tragic way and he picked himself up and reinvented himself as a Nobel Prize-winning author and activist,” Plotz said. “And that was a kind of use of the media.”

Asked about that comparison, Spitzer replied:

“Al Gore, I think, is the finest example of it, somebody many of us wish, feel, should have been president but then went on to galvanize public opinion in a remarkable way around a critical issue. So you look at him as an exemplar of the capacity to do things outside the most traditional structure of governance.”

Is this proper?

Other media analysts have questioned the propriety of awarding columns and other prominent platforms to tainted public figures. Clark Hoyt, public editor of the New York Times, has challenged his own newspaper’s publishing of Blodget’s writings about financial markets.

Geneva Overholser, director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, said a distinction must be made as to whether a public figure is writing about subjects that are connected to his or her personal ethical lapses. While she agreed with Hoyt’s judgment about Blodget, she sees Spitzer’s case as different because he has been writing about finance and the ethics of deregulation and not, say, about the morality of marital infidelity.

“Eliot Spitzer knows things that are valuable for us to know” about the current financial situation, she said. “If he were trying to pose as Mr. Morality, I hope that we’d laugh him off the stage.”

She added, “I think if we as a nation are only going to look for advice from those whose personal lives are unblemished, we wouldn’t be well off.”

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reed.johnson@latimes.com