Firas Durri

Forgive and Forget:

I did not know until the Newsweek article that young Eliot “carried a Samsonite briefcase to junior high,” and this really does help explain a lot. …

He was a great attorney general. But maybe the real lesson from the Spitzer story is that it is important to avoid electing chief executives who spent their glory days as prosecuting attorneys.

If you’re in a state as ridden with corruption and dismal political practices as this one, it often does seem that the prosecutors are the only ones who can get anything done. They’re great at going after bad guys. But they don’t seem to be good at bringing people together behind a banner of change. The public just becomes spectators to the great ongoing squabble.

Under our famous ex-prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, City Hall became a very large version of Jack Bauer’s Counter Terrorist Unit in “24” — a heavily fortified bunker where a kind of nerdy group of warriors spent their lives trying to identify the next villain.

Unlike C.T.U., however, Giuliani’s troops tended to pick the wrong targets, lobbing their missiles at the mild-mannered bureaucrats who ran the World Trade Center (and opposed Rudy’s plans for privatizing the airports) rather than the people who were actually trying to bomb it.

While Spitzer was better at picking his enemies, his reign seemed similar in many ways with people vying for glory based less on success than the intensity of their warfare. Since he has decided that his future, whatever it involves, will not include ever being quoted again by The New York Times, I can’t tell you how he reacted to this assessment. However, I think it is fair to say that he disagrees.

Maybe he’s right. There were early achievements before he became embroiled in a series of shouting matches with Republicans. But as Washington grumbles about Barack Obama being too accommodating, it’s useful to remember that unless you pick your fights very, very carefully, you’ll risk wasting your best ammunition on the wrong targets and leaving the country exhausted from all the yelling.

Meanwhile, New York appears to be facing a looming battle for the governor’s office between Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Rudy Giuliani. Indictments at dawn.

I wonder what Caroline Kennedy’s up to these days.