If only sex hadn't distracted him!

I was sure that he would be the first Jewish president of the US. In fact, if everything had been going well, I think he would have made a fine deputy to Obama--a much better choice than Joe "foot in the mouth" Biden. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a mortal, after all.

No, I am not referring to John "I had an affair while my wife was battling cancer" Edwards.

It is Eliot Spitzer I am referring to. He, too, will be rehabilitated in the public sphere, but in a much lesser capacity. His tough-guy approach, with white collar criminals, and his sharp thinking comes across clearly in his latest column in Slate, where he looks at the role of the NY Fed. Spitzer writes:

The composition of the New York Fed's board, which supervises the organization and current Chairman Friedman, is equally troubling. The board consists of nine individuals, three chosen by the N.Y. Fed member banks as their own representatives, three chosen by the member banks to represent the public, and three chosen by the national Fed Board of Governors to represent the public. In theory this sounds great: Six board members are "public" representatives.

So whom have the banks chosen to be the public representatives on the board during the past decade, as the crisis developed and unfolded? Dick Fuld, the former chairman of Lehman; Jeff Immelt, the chairman of GE; Gene McGrath, the chairman of Con Edison; Ronay Menschel, the chairwoman of Phipps Houses and also, not insignificantly, the wife of Richard Menschel, a former senior partner at Goldman. Whom did the Board of Governors choose as its public representatives? Steve Friedman, the former chairman of Goldman; Pete Peterson; Jerry Speyer, CEO of real estate giant Tishman Speyer; and Jerry Levin, the former chairman of Time Warner. These were the people who were supposedly representing our interests!

It is almost like it was Ralph Nader who authored this piece. The downfall triggered by yielding to the flesh--Spitzer was not the first, nor will be the last!
Spitzer then adds:

So is it any wonder that the N.Y. Fed has been complicit in the single greatest bailout of poorly managed banks in history? Any wonder that it has given—with virtually no strings attached—practically the entire contents of the Treasury to the very banks whose inability to manage risk has brought our economy to its knees? Any wonder that not a single CEO or senior executive of a major bank has been removed as a condition of hundreds of billions of direct cash and guarantees? Any wonder that, despite its fundamental responsibility to preserve the integrity of the banking system, it sat quietly on the sidelines as the leverage beneath the banks exploded and the capital underlying their investments shrank?

I do not mean to suggest that any of these board members intentionally discharged their duties with the specific goal of benefitting themselves. Rather, what we have seen is disastrous groupthink, a way of looking at the world from the perspective of Wall Street and Wall Street alone.