NYTimes
Admiration, Thy Name Is Spitzer
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: August 22, 2006
Listening to the Democratic candidates for attorney general in their debate the other night was enough to make one wonder why Eliot Spitzer is running for a position as lowly as governor. To hear the four of them talk about Mr. Spitzer, who holds the job they all want, he might as well skip the preliminaries and shoot for canonization.

Sure, he has some flaws, the candidates allowed. But over all, they referred to Mr. Spitzer in reverential tones of the sort that the pope might expect from L’Osservatore Romano.

Mark Green said that as New York City’s consumer affairs commissioner, “I sued hundreds of businesses for fraud — like Eliot Spitzer.”

Sean Patrick Maloney said, “Eliot’s been a terrific attorney general.”

Charlie King said, “You’re going to hear a lot of comparisons between all of us with Eliot Spitzer. I have the most like Eliot Spitzer.” The syntax may have been inelegant, but the veneration was clear.

Andrew M. Cuomo said: “To me, Eliot Spitzer’s legacy is: deliver results. Don’t just talk about the problem. Solve the problem.” Mr. Cuomo’s television commercial, by the way, lingers on an image of him standing side by side with Mr. Spitzer.

Even Jeanine F. Pirro, the Republican candidate in this race, has been unsparing with hosannas for the Democratic attorney general. What New Yorkers want, she said last week, is someone “who has the skill set of Eliot Spitzer.”

Along with all this adoration, most news coverage suggests that Mr. Spitzer’s true title should be governor-in-waiting. Often, he is the only candidate for the job whose opinions on a given issue are recorded in print or on air.

This, on one level, is understandable. Opinion polls show him ahead by 50 or 60 percentage points, whether matched against his opponent in the Democratic primary, Thomas R. Suozzi, or the Republican candidate, John Faso. New Yorkers have seen few leads that huge since Secretariat won the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths.

Still, there is a little thing called fairness.

Mr. Green criticizes news organizations for fixing on poll numbers and the size of campaign accounts at the expense of what the candidates have to say. While one of Mr. Green’s talents is to sound petulant when he makes such statements, he has a point.

The phenomenon that he describes is acute in a year like this, when all statewide races except the one for attorney general are about as competitive as the Yankees’ blowout of the Red Sox over the weekend. How candidates are supposed to get access to voters in this environment is no small question.

TAKE Jonathan Tasini.

What? You never heard of him? Can’t blame you. Some may even believe that his first name is Little-known, given that he is sometimes referred to as Little-known Jonathan Tasini.

He is a labor organizer and writer who is running in the Democratic primary as an antiwar challenger to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. His chances of victory would seem to hover somewhere between nil and zilch. Even so, whatever the strengths or weaknesses of his ideas, he is a legitimate candidate who qualified for the Sept. 12 primary ballot.

Mrs. Clinton, however, has not deigned to debate him. Nor has NY1 News, a dominant force in New York election campaigns, deemed him worthy to be included in the debates that it sponsors. Its rules require a candidate to have raised at least $500,000 to merit an invitation. Mr. Tasini doesn’t come close.

His supporters accuse NY1 of redlining their man. In response, the station’s general manager, Steve Paulus, says that $500,000 is not an insurmountable sum and that a dollar cutoff is needed to determine which candidates deserve to be taken seriously. NY1 hardly ignores Mr. Tasini in its news reports, Mr. Paulus says, and besides, the real issue is Mrs. Clinton and her unwillingness thus far to expose herself to a debate.

Point taken. Nonetheless, you have to wonder if we have formally reached the stage where the relative worthiness of political candidates is decided not by the content of their ideas but rather the bulk of their wallets. What does this say about our political life?

Maybe Governor Spitzer has the answer.

Oops! Sorry about that. He’s not the governor, is he? Almost forgot.

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