Is there a road to redemption for Spitzer?

IT is unlikely that anyone's downfall has brought so much joy to so many in so short a time as that of the erstwhile governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

For years, with his long chin jutting out, this tall and lanky New Yorker threatened and achieved the ruin of many a Wall Streeter and in more recent years, of prostitution circles. Nobody disagreed that he was enforcing laws that were on the books. It was the way he did it: it was with a childlike grin, but that of the bully, who was holier than thou. But apparently the slogan he was telling himself was "catch me if you can".

He was having sex with the women he was seeking to be sent to jail. And no doubt the family fortune which was the backdrop of his arrogance continued to increase because of the insider trading that he was prosecuting.

Is there a road to redemption for Spitzer? What on earth can he do next after so spectacular a downfall? There is an almost exact parallel from Britain, played out 45 years ago. John Profumo was the minister of defence in the long-serving government of Harold Macmillan, and was even in the Privy Council.

But he had had an affair with a beautiful young lady named Christine Keeler, who, alas, had also been sleeping with a Russian spy.

In March 1963, Profumo insisted that there was "no impropriety whatever" in his relationship with Keeler. But the facts came out that he had done something far worse than an affair: he had lied to the House of Commons. It ended his career and helped to end Macmillan's.

I arrived in Oxford at about this time, and nobody could talk about anything else.

Well, poor old Profumo, who died just a few years ago, redeemed himself somewhat by working in a variety of East End slums, but his name remained synonymous with sex scandal.

Right now, the pundits in America are getting much needed relief from the Obama-Clinton spectacular, for example suggesting that we now have the ultimate source of global warming -- a certain special part of Eliot Spitzer's anatomy. But it is nothing as compared with the Brits in 1963.

A TV show parodied an old ditty like this: see him in the House of Commons; making laws to put the blame; while the object of his passion; walks the streets to hide her shame. We Americans can never catch up with the Brits in the realm of language.

What made Spitzer do it? If he wanted more sex than his marriage provided, there are traditional ways of going about this that are not even illegal. He was not only flouting the law, he was flaunting his ability to ride high above it. When you are paying US$5,000 an hour and flying to the most prestigious hotel in Washington for your fun, there must be something else going on.

There seems to be a psychological phenomenon where high flyers must test their power in order to believe it's real. Gary Hart had the democratic presidential nomination in the palm of his hands in the 1990s, until he dared the press to catch him in an infidelity. And catch him they did, on a boat ride to Bimini. Some people are saying right now that power equals sex, but it's a lot more complicated. Sex is just one of the tests for one's power. One can test it after all by seeing how many slums you can clean up, the way former President Ramos did in the Philippines, but that's unusual. His successor came to power on the shoulders of the poor, and then ruthlessly exploited them through his corruption that drained the national finances and worsened the plight of the poor. It is doubtful that the all-night orgies, in which the price of admission was usually a few bottles of Petrus at US$1,000 a throw, helped the poor much either.

Somehow, I doubt that Spitzer will try a humble comeback in the slums of New York. His fall from grace is just too dramatic and pathetic. I think there are several more rounds to come before the gods of hubris and nemesis have had their fill.