“HO NO”? We were way off!
Eliot Spitzer is still holed up in his apartment in New York, where he and his wife, Silda, have been conferring with advisers since last night. He’s weighing his options, and deciding whether to resign. Meanwhile, on the outside, the politicians and the media have descended into exactly the kind of feeding frenzy you would expect:
• The Post reports that State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno held back from reveling in his great rival’s fall: “I feel very badly for the governor’s wife, for his children,” he said. “The important thing for the people of New York State is that people in office do the right thing.”
• According to CNN, Republican state senators and assemblymen (and some Democrats) are aggressively calling for his resignation. So is the Republican Governors Association.
• If Spitzer doesn’t resign before a deadline set by state Republicans, they’ve vowed to begin impeachment proceedings, reports WCBS.
• The Post, Daily News, Newsday, have all demanded Spitzer’s immediate resignation.
• The Times, which first uncovered the prostitution debacle, stops short of calling for his head. “Mr. Spitzer did not seem to understand on Monday what he owed the public — a strong argument for why he should be trusted again,” the editorial board writes. “The longer he hesitates, it becomes a harder case to make.”
• The Journal also doesn’t quite drop the ax. “One might call it Shakespearian if there were a shred of nobleness in the story of Eliot Spitzer’s fall,” they wrote in a scathing editorial. “There is none. Governor Spitzer, who made his career by specializing in not just the prosecution, but the ruin, of other men, is himself almost certainly ruined.”
Update: Though some aides have indicated they think he’ll quit, the Daily Princetonian (the paper of record for Spitzer’s alma mater) reached him on the phone last night. As of then, he was still responding to resignation queries thusly: “”I just can’t answer the question.”
