Joe Conason has a short but interesting review of a biography of Eliot Spitzer. He nicely summarizes what Spitzer did that “earned him the enduring fury of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the conservative Federalist Society and every other exponent of an unfettered marketplace”:

He exposed widespread corruption, cronyism and immorality at the commanding heights of the American economy, exploding the myth of the self-regulating market. And he refashioned the conservative version of “federalism” into a weapon for liberal elected officials in the states, while the Bush administration was letting lobbyists write legislation and run regulatory agencies.

And he rightly points out the new challenges that Spitzer will face if elected governor:

Rather than policing business executives, he will need to persuade them to invest in the depressed upstate region. Instead of filing lawsuits and indictments, he will have to pursue his laudable goals within the constraints of a balanced budget and a bipartisan culture of legislative inertia.

I, for one, am eager to see how Spitzer handles these responsibilities. I have a friend who works in Spitzer’s office, and he tells me that in addition to Spitzer being very driven (obviously), he is also very, very smart. This certainly doesn’t guarantee success, but when you look at the alternative…

In the course of recounting Spitzer’s privileged upbringing, Conason comments that “the most challenging crisis faced by the real estate millionaire’s son [was] a last-minute change in thesis topics (from the philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice to ‘Revolutions in Post-Stalin Eastern Europe’).” I assume this was his senior thesis at Princeton. I wonder how far he got with that first one?