Good riddance to Spitzer

I think it is good for the country that Eliot Spitzer has resigned in disgrace. Based on reports of his activities, the man was an unsavory amalgam of the worst characteristics of Joe McCarthy and Huey Long. He did significant substantive harm to the nation and economy with his witch hunts on Wall Street, but beyond that he weakened the rule of law and the safeguards of the Constitution with his tactics of extortion by threat of prosecution. The news is full of reports of good and honest people who were smeared, persecuted, and intimidated by this scoundrel, often in cases that seem to be nothing more than vendettas . He was shrewd, unprincipled, dogmatic, vindictive, arrogant, blustering, a walking textbook on abuse of power. We can wish him good riddance.

But before we do, we should ask why most of the people in the traditional media organizations ignored his tactics and abuses and helped create an image of him as some sort of crusader. Some parts of the answer are obvious. He was a leftist and a rich New Yorker. He had attended the right schools. He dressed well and had a nice looking wife. His targets for persecution were mainly business people. He was fashionable. He came along at the right time, just when the American left, perhaps frightened by the manifest improvements that high technology and other industries had made in the country in the 1980’s and 1990’s, had decided it was time to try to whip up a good old fashioned wave of anti-business hysteria.

However, I think there may be more to it than simple political bias. There are other left wing politicians around that the press could have hyped, and Spitzer was not just a leftist. He was a power grabber who seems to have acted consistently on the notion that his progressive ends justified his thuggish means. Could it be that those in the old line press have more or less explicitly accepted the same notion and are unable to be useful as watchdogs against abuses of power by the right sort of guys?