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Eliot Mess

It is not often that the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal arrive to the same conclusion, but they’ve done so today even after having traveled differing routes. The WSJ characterizes New York governor Elliot Spitzer’s recent woes as an inevitable example of unchecked power and prosecutorial ambition:

In our system, citizens agree to invest one of their own with the power of public prosecution. We call this a public trust. The ability to bring the full weight of state power against private individuals or entities has been recognized since the Magna Carta as a power with limits. At nearly every turn, Eliot Spitzer has refused to admit that he was subject to those limits.

The stupendously deluded belief that the sitting Governor of New York could purchase the services of prostitutes was merely the last act of a man unable to admit either the existence of, or need for, limits. At the least, he put himself at risk of blackmail, and in turn the possible distortion of his public duties. Mr. Spitzer’s recklessness with the state’s highest elected office, though, is of a piece with his consistent excesses as Attorney General from 1999 to 2006.

The Times meanwhile disagrees with the governor that this was a purely personal matter and concurs that he has broken the public trust, but mostly seems to lament the lost opportunity of Wise Government to set everything aright:

A further tragedy here, beyond the personal one of the Spitzer family and the damage he has done to the reform cause, is that Mr. Spitzer

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