So basically, nobody knows what's happening inside Eliot Spitzer's Fifth Avenue apartment. The state's Democratic leadership has completely dropped off the radar; emails and phone calls aren't being returned, and Democrats trying to figure out whether they should fight to keep Spitzer in office or write him off have no direction whatsoever.
It's like nothing so much as a split screen, where we're seeing two movies playing that we've seen before.
The first movie is, as Daniel Millstone lays out below, the one about partisan prosecutions emanating from the Bush Department of Justice, which is furiously feeding leaks about the case to the press. We know now, for example, from investigators, that Spitzer had more than half a dozen assignations over the last eight months, in places including Washington and Dallas. The timeframe suggests, incidentally, that one Alberto Gonzales authorized the investigation in the first place - the same Gonzales that had to step down for politicizing the Department of Justice. The entire investigation into Spitzer looks increasingly just like that: an investigation into Spitzer, one that happened to find something. This was a political hit, completely conforming to a pattern established by the Bush Department of Justice. The fact that this fishing expedition came up with something shouldn't distract from that. Wayne Barrett on WNYC puts it well: this has the suddenness of an assassination.
The other movie playing right now is the one we saw back during the drivers license debacle. The governor's office is incapable of leading public opinion or of responding effectively when they're running into a wall. Just to re-cap: the first contact between the New York Times and that office, with inquiries about the scandal, happened on Friday. It is now Wednesday. During that time, not even the semblance of a public defense was mounted. There was no outreach, as far as we know, to Democratic office-holders or possible proxies. As a result, for example, Darrel Aubertine, just elected with the full-throttle assistance of Spitzer's political organization, came out with a call for the governor to resign.
If Eliot resigns, as some media reports now indicate he will, there need to be drastic changes in the Executive Chamber. This is no way to run the third-largest state in the union, no matter what else happens.
