Stubbornly Like Johnson?

An odd article from the New York Times today that looks at where Eliot Spitzer has gone wrong. Generally friendly in tone to the embattled Governor of New York, it has a few things that might make New Yorkers think even more negatively about him than they already do.

Nearly all of the advisers now concede that they deeply misjudged how the driver’s license proposal would fare, though few believed that it would permanently hobble Mr. Spitzer and fewer still blamed the governor himself.

Those outside the executive chamber, however, mostly echoed Mr. Cunningham. Some of Mr. Spitzer’s toughest critics questioned whether he could rehabilitate himself. More troubling than his blunders, they said, is a suspicion that he does not learn from them.

“With Spitzer, it seems like he’s walked into buzz saws of his own devising,” said Richard Norton Smith, a biographer of former Gov. Thomas E. Dewey who is now at work on a book about Nelson Rockefeller. “He spent capital, but it’s hard to say how it leads to some payoff, unless he’s been humbled and educated by his first year.”

Lessons Learned

Mr. Spitzer said he had, in fact, been hitting the books. While he has previously delved into biographies of governors like Roosevelt, Charles Hughes and Al Smith, all of whom battled the Legislature to bring about change, he said he was now pondering the lessons of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who matched brute will to a subtle mastery of the legislative process.

“There’s an art there that I would like to be more successful at,” Mr. Spitzer said. “Life is a learning process, and a little more Lyndon Johnson would not hurt.”

Somehow, I find a reliance on Lyndon Johnson as a role model disturbing. I think the fact that Spitzer does not, in fact, appear to learn from his mistakes is the real problem he is facing. The Licenses for Lawbreakers® scheme was a pretty good example of that. He pushed and pushed until ran right through the spinning blade of the buzz saw. He appeared to be enable to see the real damage he was doing - even on a national level - to Democrats. In the end he looked weak and ineffectual and cost himself a lot of support. Choosing Lyndon Johnson as a new hero is not likely to improve things for him.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire hits it right on the head: "So Eliot Spitzer hopes to bring the best of Reagan, Giuliani, and LBJ.  Go, libs!"