As the 2006 campaign begins, I find myself baffled by the volume and tone of the vitriol the right is throwing at Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Eliot Spitzer. I expected the minority party to go negative quickly, as their only hope for victory in this state rests on making the Democrat thoroughly unpalatable. However, the bitterness and viciousness of the attacks speaks of something larger. The right truly hates Eliot Spitzer.
Hatred is actually a rare thing in politics. Bill Clinton was hated; Hillary still is, as are, on the other side of the spectrum, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and perhaps Tom DeLay. But that's about it. To find Eliot Spitzer in that kind of company is a surprising thing, to me at least.
The thing about real, gut-wrenching, raw hatred is that it always has a component of the irrational, of treating the object as a symbolic template. There is also usually an undercurrent of fear.
On the face of it, Eliot is an odd candidate for hatred. He's an aggressive prosecutor, yes, and he'll likely be a Progressive governor, although his issue positions are not as liberal as some of his supporters seem to think. In fact, his primary opponent – Suozzi is going to announce an exploratory committee on Friday – can be reasonably described as somewhat to his left. And yet, Tom Suozzi is drawing the support, for now at least, of some very unlikely figures, such as Ken Langone and, it seems, the right-wing New York blogosphere.
I would hazard the guess, to do some amateur psychologizing, that the right, especially its more reactionary components, see in the crusading muckraker and slayer of CEO dragons Spitzer an archetype their own propaganda has told them to expect: the aggressive, hardline expropriator of property, a left-wing activist crusader with perhaps a whiff of the socialist about him. That alone would not necessarily be enough to arouse the kind of hatred Eliot now faces. However, Eliot also presents a real and credible challenge for the right, and poses a threat they have not faced since 1934: total defeat.
This will be an interesting campaign season.
