Me so haughty.
Suzy Susan Estrich says that the easy explanation of the fall of Stupid Eliot Spitzer is the common desire for sexual variety.
Estrich concedes that people "get stupid" about sex but claims that this does not, in itself, explain the story. Because Spitzer didn't merely hire a hooker, he also did a lot of other really dumb things.
He used his own cell phone to arrange for a prostitute to go from New York to Washington, D.C., to have sex with him. Didn't he remember the stuff I taught him about how crossing state lines and using phone wires turn things into federal crimes, about the aptly named Mann Act, which makes prostitution a federal offense when you cross state lines to do it?Eight years of prosecuting Wall Street as attorney general of New York, and he was still clumsy enough in pulling money from his own accounts that his bank noted it and alerted the authorities to suspicious transactions on his account.
See? Spitzer wasn't merely horny. He was sloppy. Like a naive, dopey teenager who does risky things because he can't imagine dying, that horndog thought "it couldn't happen to me".
Estrich claims that anyone who runs for high office has to be arrogant. He has to see himself as someone special. Otherwise, he wouldn't have the nerve to put himself on public display so endlessly. Even if you are special, though, there are still limits to your power but when you're in office and feeling powerful, that can be hard to see.
There's a serious problem here, isn't there? In order to do great things you can't be immobilized by fear. You can't even be too cautious. You have to think "No matter what I do, I'm going to be home free." But that very same arrogance is going to do you in.
So, how do you guard against it? You have to watch out when this wonderful, buoyant confidence tells you, essentially, that you are not bound by gravity. You cannot only take on high risk ventures but you can jump off a cliff without a parachute because you don't have to take the obvious precautions to protect you from danger.
According to Estrich, that's what happened to Eliot. Sex didn't make him stupid. He was driven mad by power and, so, he over-reached, not in an admirable way, but like a rank amateur, pathetically.
