| One thing is very clear: Eliot Spitzer and Joe Bruno never liked each other. That was evident during the Troopergate days and even now with both men out of the political limelight.
But in a New York Times piece today, Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim compare Spitzer/Bruno to the Governor David Paterson/Caroline Kennedy saga.
An administration leaks damaging information about a political figure. The leak is denounced by the governor, who says that he had nothing to do with it.
This is what happened during the tenure of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, whose aides disseminated information about state-financed travel in 2007 by Joseph L. Bruno, then the Senate majority leader. This led to condemnation of Mr. Spitzer, the resignations of some of those aides, and charges that some of the aides had violated the Public Officers Law, which sets standards for state officials' conduct.
It is also the story of what happened nearly two weeks ago after Caroline Kennedy withdrew her name from consideration for Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate seat.
A review of public comments and interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the process make clear that Gov. David A. Paterson's administration released confidential information about Ms. Kennedy and misled reporters about its significance as part of an orchestrated effort to discredit her after she withdrew. But the governor is unlikely to face the legal scrutiny or numerous investigations that Mr. Spitzer did, even though he has acknowledged that the information about Ms. Kennedy should not have been released.
The article goes on to highlight the Paterson/Kennedy controversy, which included a few claims involving Kennedy's personal life from long ago.
One of the administration's central claims to reporters was that Ms. Kennedy had, in the words of a person close to the governor, "a definite tax issue" and "a nanny problem" that "she didn't want to become public."
But that story was inaccurate. The governor and his aides now acknowledge that those issues - a tax lien of a few hundred dollars in 1994, and a lapsed visa for a foreign nanny who worked for Ms. Kennedy during the late 1980s - had been resolved years earlier and were never considered disqualifying during the vetting process.
I don't think Paterson/Kennedy compares to Spitzer/Bruno. But I do think that the Paterson/Kennedy saga has been damaging to Paterson. Smearing Caroline Kennedy was the worst thing that he and his administration could do. Whether she was qualified to become a U.S. senator or not we could have debated for a long time. But smearing her like the Paterson administration did was wrong on many levels. |
