Article Compares Spitzer to 'Citizen Kane' Character
By JACOB GERSHMAN,
Before Eliot Spitzer was elected governor, the Republican Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, assumed he had a nonaggression pact with his future adversary, according to a lengthy profile of Mr. Spitzer in the January issue of Vanity Fair.
"He thought they had a deal: he'd let Spitzer be the best chief executive New York ever had, and Spitzer would let Bruno keep his Senate majority. Together, they'd run New York," a Vanity Fair contributing editor, David Margolick, writes in an 8,000-word piece titled "The Year of Governing Dangerously."
Mr. Bruno told Vanity Fair the deal fell apart when Mr. Spitzer began campaigning on behalf of Democratic state Senate candidates in vulnerable Republican districts prior to last year's election. The Senate leader said he called Mr. Spitzer to complain, and apparently triggered a furious response. "I was absolutely astounded," Mr. Bruno told the magazine. "He lost it."
The governor denied that such a pact existed, the magazine said.
A critical examination of Mr. Spitzer's stormy first year in office, the article says the Princeton-educated governor has been hampered by "holes in his education."
"He did not know Albany," Mr. Margolick writes. He compares the governor to the character Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane," and Mr. Bruno to the title character's political opponent, Boss Jim Gettys.
It also quotes Mr. Spitzer's senior adviser, Lloyd Constantine, who downplays the controversies swirling around the governor.
"It's rogues, but it's not rogues throwing Molotov cocktails. These are spitballs," Mr. Constantine told the magazine. "For you or me, we'd have to commit a felony. For him, it's just wiping his nose on his sleeve."
The article is the first of two extensive magazine profiles of the governor appearing in December.
The New Yorker, another Condé Nast publication, is expected to publish a piece by Nick Paumgarten, who is said to have interviewed the governor extensively and even accompanied him to a Bruce Springsteen concert.
