CNN has confirmed that Eliot Spitzer will announcing his resignation at 11:30am.

Last night I saw a flurry of emails blanket my inbox with aq series of "unbelieavable", "still in shock" and the not so occasional "I'm angry".

I had spent most of the afternoon trying to sort out my thoughts fast enough for an Op/Ed, and I would always come back to the misgivings I've had since he took office a little over a year ago. That Eliot Spitzer's problem and weakness has always been his success because he never really needed anything other than a vote from you or me to get elected.

Eliot Spitzer didn't really need a million New Yorkers giving $5 or $10 donations to his campaign to get elected. He never needed to learn how to get people out on the streets to support his campaign to get him elected. He never needed to swallow his pride and shut up and take criticism from his own base in order to gain political influence. And he certainly never had to pound the pavement and get people out on election day to make sure people would get out of their homes and offices to cast a vote.

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.

To say the state's mainstream media is making too much out of the animosity between Bruno and Spitzer is an understatement. It shows how little actual reporting is happening not just in Albany and New York City but in each and every major newspaper in the state.

Yeah, sure, I actually find it entertaining to deconstruct the Spitzspeak. There's small tics and twitches, physical and verbal, that say a lot about his thought process.

One of those verbal tics is his over-emphatic use of the phrase "I believe". You can listen to it in this impromptu press conference he gave at the NYSDems Spring meeting. He was asked about and earlier spat with Bruno and this is what he had to say :

The question we all need to ask is : Is this news?

I can't picture Eliot Spitzer as a slacker or a hoodlum, but that's basically how he not only describes his student years at Harvard, but it's how he says some of his teachers described him as well.

It was an interesting moment given that, once you hear the punchline, it makes the reason for the story a bit lopsided. He was thanking the people in the room for coming to the meeting. As he was going to proceed with his speech he said something to the effect that, unless you were the kind of teenager he was on a beautiful day like that you wouldn't have shown up --and still be successful.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Much to ponder on an otherwise funny anecdote.
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Certain mainstream media writers remarked how odd it was for Spitzer to turn a reference of a potentially derogatory spoof into a speech about the future of New York.

I did too. The Producers is the 11th funniest movie in the American Film Institute's 100 Funniest Films of All Time. I mean, how can you take on images of a Ziegfiled's Follies swastika and a gayalicious Roger Debris Hitler calling himself the Etherl Merman of Germany? Somehow, Spitzer pulls it off.

The following is a clipping of the whole speech but it will give you great insight into Spitzer's oratiorial skills.

Once you get past the springtime cliches, you'll start to hear the prosecutor speaking, with a phrase like "we are winning because we are right and because we are making our case".

The video is right after the jump.

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Well ... the sky is falling.

Pigs are flying.

Hell froze over.

James Tedisco has proposed legislation to regulate campaign fundraising "bundling".

I actually think this proposal is a good idea.

May 1, 2007 -- ALBANY - In a very public poke at Gov. Spitzer, Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco yesterday said he is introducing legislation that would limit how much fund-raising "bundlers" can pull together for a political campaign.

[...]

"If anything defines pay to play, this is it," said Tedisco (R-Schenectady), whose bill would limit the amount an individual can raise for a candidate, a practice known as bundling, to $100,000.

Comparing those who bundle to "bagmen," Tedisco would also require a campaign to identify those who bundle for them and how much they raised, list the names, occupation, employer, and spouse's employer of all individual contributors, and list specific access gained by contribution level.

As to what do I think about Spitzer's sauntering to California for a re-election fundraiser? I only have one thing to say :

WHAT THE HELL WAS HE THINKING?!?!?!

The Sun reports that marriage equality is making gains in Albany - but the Senate remains a roadblock.

According to the article, Gov. Spitzer seems to be ready to make a push for legalization of gay marriage after the budget fight is over, and it's looking increasingly likely that the Assembly will go along:

The Empire State Pride Agenda, a leading gay advocacy group in New York, says 54 members of the 150-person Assembly have expressed support for a gay marriage bill, up from 35 when it polled the chamber in September.

"We think it has a real shot of passing in the Assembly this year," the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, Alan Van Capelle, told The New York Sun.

One of those 54 Assembly members is Richard Brodsky, a Democrat who represents a district in Westchester. Mr. Brodsky said he senses that support for a bill is growing in his conference. "I think the prejudice is diminishing. People are thinking about it in reasonable terms," he said.

Brodsky's in the weeds on Albany reform, but he's got the right idea civil rights, it seems.

However, not only would a marriage equality bill die in Joe Bruno's Senate, it might not fare much better in a Democratic Senate, either.

(More below the fold...)

At Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens, Thursday night, public school advocates, parents, principals and politicians gathered to support the school spending plan proposed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer. The meeting, sponsored by the Alliance for Quality Education, the NAACP, the UFT and New Yorkers For Smaller Classes, featured AQE director Billy Easton and Campaign for Fiscal Equity dirctor Geri Palast who have been at so many meeting together they finish each others sentences.

The task at hand: focus the crowd to pressure Queens GOP Senators Maltese and Padavan to support the Spitzer scheme (which I'll describe below).

The key issue: class size. I think that the reason that Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein don't care about it, and refuse to spend money on it is that they see our children as objects to be processed by the schools not as individuals, each with her or his own needs. Assemby members Nolan and Lancman have introduced a bill to require our Mayor to reduce class size.

The big news: GOP Senator Maltese will support the class size limits. Almost losing his re-election, seems to have woken him up. Senator Padavan is rumored to be supporting the class size intitiative as well.