Eliot Spitzer’s new life

Eliot Spitzer would like to return from exile, says Jonathan Darman in Newsweek. It’s been more than a year since the former New York state governor resigned in disgrace following revelations that he had patronized a high-price prostitution service. The scandal smashed a meteoric political career, and Spitzer still can’t quite explain what got into him. “One thing I’m very bad at is being publicly introspective,” he says. “The human mind permits people to do things that they rationally know are wrong, outrageous. We succumb to temptations that we know are wrong and foolish, and then in hindsight we say, ‘How could I have?’” But Spitzer would rather not talk about the past. Instead, he’s tiptoeing back into the world, writing a weekly column for Slate.com, and giving a few TV interviews about the economic crisis. Is he running for office again? “I don’t know if I could,’’ he says, but admits he misses the adrenaline, attention, and high-stakes competition of political life. “One of the hardest things to accept is that we are replaceable. You feel like saying, ‘Wait a minute, how can things be continued without me?’ I wish desperately that none of this had ever happened, and I were there, able to do what I wanted to do. That is a burden I just have to carry. I have no one to blame but myself.”

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