A fiscal conservative in the bedroom

By: James Gil

U.S. Sen. David Vitter is obviously correct when he says “anyone who looks at the two cases will see there is an enormous difference” between him and Eliot Spitzer.

There are, it is true, superficial similarities when two sanctimonious humbugs in high office get caught humping whores in Washington.

But, at a philosophical level, there is no comparison. Vitter, as befits a Republican who styles himself a fiscal conservative, stuck to a relatively modest budget, apparently never paying more than a few hundred an hour for sex.

Money was no object when Spitzer needed to get out of town and jump into some hooker’s arms after a hard day governing New York. Vitter could have afforded maybe 20 hookers for what Spitzer paid for one.

Perhaps Spitzer’s extravagance owed more to his vast personal fortune than his affiliation with the Democratic Party. But the least you can say for Vitter is he got more bang for his buck.

Another glaring difference in the two cases was the fallout. Spitzer promptly resigned, much, no doubt, to the relief of his wife and children. Vitter preferred to guarantee further humiliation and embarrassment for his by clinging onto office and thereby giving the scandal extra legs. As soon as Spitzer fessed up, Vitter must have known there would be further calls for his resignation, but he remains obdurate.

The reaction of the political parties could not have been more different either. Nobody in the entire Democratic Party seems to have had any doubt that Spitzer had to go, and he was out of office in days.

When Vitter returned to Washington last year after confessing his “very serious sin” and uttering the usual bilge about making peace with the Almighty, his colleagues gave him a standing ovation.

It is true Spitzer had few friends to fall back on in his hour of need, for he was about as popular with the Legislature in Albany as he was with the Wall Street titans and the madams he busted in his days as New York’s attorney general. He was widely regarded as more of an egomaniac and a bully than as noble crusader sometimes depicted in the public prints. It matters not who is right on that issue; Spitzer was a goner.

Vitter is not exactly warm and cuddly either, although maybe there is a hooker somewhere who takes a different view -- but his colleagues in Congress did not desert him when he turned out to be just another “family values” fraud.

But their support had less to do with his personal attributes than with political calculations. When Vitter fell from grace, Louisiana’s then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco would presumably have named a Democrat to replace him. Republicans would have given the devil a standing ovation before they allowed that to happen.

The most comforting difference between the two cases, from Vitter’s point of view, concerns criminal liability. Johns rarely get prosecuted in any jurisdiction for what, in any case, is hardly a major crime. Vitter’s offenses may have occurred so long ago that the deadline for filing charges is past anyway.

Although the underlying offense is the same in Spitzer’s case, he not only went further up-market but also further afield, across state lines. He may thus have committed a felony under the Mann Act, and very recently at that. There could be “an enormous difference” in consequence.

Vitter is the only one who has been able to figure out what he says are the real motives of “people who are trying to draw comparisons” between him and Spitzer. They are doing it “because they never agreed with me on important issues like immigration.”

It is not unusual for politicians in a jam to invoke national security, but they are seldom as transparently dishonest as this. Nobody can possibly believe that an inability to tell one whoremongering hypocrite from another bespeaks a desire to flood the country with illegal aliens.

(James Gill is a staff writer with the Times Picayune. He can be reached at (504) 826-3318 or at jgill@timespicayune.com.)