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My Eliot Spitzer Op/Ed for Metro.us
Metro newspaper just published Voices: Spitzer floated on air, but lack of roots did him in, my Op/Ed on the Spitzer debacle.
Here's the money quote :
For netroots activists like me, who have had the chance to take a peek at the mechanical beast, the New York State Democratic Party, Eliot Spitzer was nothing but a political insider’s rock star that only needed “The (little) People†to vote so the “politics as usual†could rock New York and roll into Albany. Yet there’s a reason why “politics as usual†is losing the fight in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.
Eliot Spitzer’s weakness has been the lack of a true grassroots base. He never had his feet held to the fire by his own party base, by The People who ended up voting for him. The Republicans have known this all along, and it’s not a coincidence that they tried to scare him last year by astroturfing the Internet with fake attack blogs.
I think you are exactly right, Liza.
You write:
"Eliot Spitzer’s weakness has been the lack of a true grassroots base." So long as progressives organizers and organization go home after election day, we'll be sunk no matter who wins.
That said, Mr. Spitzer's been, in many ways, a wonderful improvement over 12 years of Pataki inertia. On labor, development on affordable housing, on education, Mr. Spitzer has led well. If everything wasn't different on day one, many things were.
Yet he was arrogant because he didn't need us
And that's basically the problem. He didn't feel the need to be accountable to anybody but himself --not even his wife and daughters, for crissake.
It's just so wrong on so many levels.
In a way he was victim of his own success.