Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

I feel sorry for Eliot Spitzer, but only to a limited extent.

Spitzer, as you probably know by now, was the governor of the State of New York who was forced from office last week because he has spent thousands of dollars for the services of prostitutes.

I always feel sorry for a powerful person who falls from grace because of personal frailties, even moral frailties.

As has been so often asked by so many, who among us is without sin? There is also the wellknown advice offered about 2,000 years ago, about allowing a person without sin to cast the first stone at a sinner.

So yes, I feel sorry for the fallen.

I feel sorry for what Conrad Black is currently going through. I felt sorry when televangelist Jim Bakker got into trouble some 20 years ago after falling into a sex scandal (which escalated to other things that saw him sent to prison). I well remember how upset I was all those years ago when I saw the front page picture of a sobbing Bakker, in handcuffs, being put in a car. This was a guy who had had just about everything anyone could want, and he had lost it all. That's sad.

I felt somewhat less sorry for his fellow televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who got in trouble a while later for his contacts with a prostitute. I didn't envy him, but I also recalled he had been one of the main people who had torpedoed Bakker. Swaggart had too much glass in his house to have been chucking stones.

I was never much of a fan of Bill Clinton, but I still felt sorry for him when he got into trouble over Monica Lewinsky and the fling they had in the Oval Office.

While I never had much use for his presidency, I did enjoy reading his memoirs, in which he had the grace to come about as clean as he could about the issue without getting graphic (there are other types of books available if I want to read detailed accounts of such encounters).

Over the years, I have read a number of the countless books that were published about Watergate. Again, I am struck by the fact that the story is about a number of men who either had power or who were close to it, and who ended up facing disgrace, ruin and in some cases, jail. True, most of them were able to land on their feet, and became quite successful afterwards. But as I have stated throughout, a fall from grace is not fun to watch, no matter if it's happening to your best friend or your worst enemy.

One must also feel for the families of these people. In most cases, they have done nothing wrong, but they must share in the disgrace and the embarrassment. In all of these stories I've cited, the families have played minor, yet significant roles, and they are roles they would almost certainly have chosen not to play.

I opened this piece by stating I feel sorry for Eliot Spitzer, but only to a limited extent.

The reason my sympathy is limited is because of the person responsible for his fall. If he wants to look for someone to point the finger of blame at, he need go no further than the nearest mirror. Spitzer got himself into this mess all by himself, and all the sympathy in the world can't relieve him of the responsibility to account for his actions.

I am not so much of a prude as to blindly condemn a man who uses the services of a prostitute, although I have never done so myself. Such an act involves many implications on a number of levels (moral, social, legal, etc.), but this activity has been going on for a very long time, and my being judgemental is not going to change things. And I am not so holier than thou to condemn a man who cheats on his spouse, although I have never done that either. Through my work, I have met over the years hundreds of people who hold high positions, bear great public trusts or who are highly thought of in their respective communities. I have great respect for many of these people, but I am not so naive as to think they are perfect.

Some of these people have ended up in scandals, and in some case, it has been demonstrated they did nothing wrong. The opposite has held in some other cases.

I have seen people I respect do things that have angered me, and while my image of them has been tarnished, in many cases, I can still admire and look up to them for the entire body of goodness I think they represent.

In Spitzer's case, the fact is he should have known better.

For one thing, he held elected office. Anyone in such a situation knows, or should know, there are some people who would like to see them out of office, and would be prepared to resort to underhanded tactics to see that happen. I have seen such tactics tried a lot of times my years in this business, with varying levels of success. And the higher the office one holds, usually the more people who want that person out.

Spitzer also got into office with an image he had evidently built over his career, as a squeaky-clean crusader against things that are shady or corrupt. Didn't he know the reckoning that he would have to face if his fooling around ever came to light?

The fact that the truth might some day come out should have occurred to him, and that people would be ready to jump on it when it did.

Like I stated before, he should have known better.

Sex scandals don't have to mean political oblivion. Bill Clinton was able to survive his woes, although his position in history will undoubtedly be compromised. He survived, I think, because the public was prepared to forgive. I remember news commentators at the time weighing the possibilities that he would be forced to leave office. I well recall one prominent local commentator using the word "dead" to describe Clinton's administration. Yet a couple of days later, opinion polls were released, stating Clinton's numbers were holding (they may have been up a little). I remember hearing that and thinking, "The guy's going to get through this," and he did.

He might still end up becoming whatever the male equivalent of a First Lady is called in the United States.

I feel for Spitzer, I feel for his friends, I feel for his family. But he has no one to blame but himself.