Spitzer

A Gilded Path to Political Stardom, With Detours

By DANNY HAKIM

Published: October 12, 2006

There could hardly be a more perfect road map to becoming a rich lawyer than the bullet points laid out on Eliot Spitzer’s formidable résumé. There was high school at prestigious Horace Mann, then Princeton and Harvard Law, followed by stints as a prosecutor for Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, and at top law firms like Paul, Weiss and Skadden, Arps.

But along the way, Eliot Spitzer would deviate from that gilded
path: at age 20 and while still at Princeton, he set off for a summer
in the Deep South to dig ditches and mop rooms at Georgia Tech, before going to pick tomatoes in upstate New York, a trip that he said “opened my eyes into a part of life I hadn’t seen.”

Fifteen
years later, at age 35, he took the biggest gamble of his life, giving
up his job as a corporate lawyer to run for New York attorney general,
a bid many considered preposterous.

What his opponents did not
count on were twin weapons in the Spitzer arsenal: a fearsome ambition
to win, and the millions of dollars that his father, Bernard Spitzer,
brought to bear on his son’s early campaigns.

The money led to accusations, later dismissed by election officials,
that Mr. Spitzer was circumventing campaign finance laws to buy the
race.

He finally prevailed in his second run, and would
transform the position to take on corporate fraud and propel himself to
national renown with his prosecutions of Wall Street investment firms
and the insurance industry.

Now, with a commanding lead in the
polls in the race for governor, Mr. Spitzer stands at the brink of
taking over a state government that is legendary for its dysfunction
and backroom deal-making.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Opinion: Spitzer has a  formidable resume but he still needs to keep his eye’s on the prize to win in november.

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