Fall of the graceless.

NONE of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's colleagues mourned his passing; their dislike helped grease his fall. One reason Bill Clinton toughed out the Lewinsky crisis was that he went into it with 60 percent approval ratings and cordial relations with congressional Democrats. Spitzer's approval ratings, after little more than a year in office, were in the 30s, and Democratic legislators in Albany hated him scarcely less than Republicans did. Spitzer was a driven, deeply insecure man who tried to master the world with bullying, bluster, and moral posturing--qualities that served him well enough as state attorney general, but not at all when it came to dealing with coequal branches of government.

Spitzer was led to his doom by a common male fantasy: that there is such a thing as a high-class prostitute. What Spitzer got instead was a 22-year-old coming off a series of lousy boyfriends and a nonexistent musical career. However far she fell short of his fantasy, she does indeed represent the high end of an industry that traffics in runaways, incest victims, and wretched indentured servants transported from chaotic parts of the world. The calls for the legalization of "sex work" that issued, predictably, from liberals and libertarians ignored the grim realities of this "business."

There was something, however, awful--both fearsome and inspiring awe--in the completeness and speed with which Spitzer's privacy, along with that of his family and his hooker, was annihilated. One moment the world knew nothing. The next it was downloading songs, pictures, and bits of taped dialogue. The 90th Psalm tells us that "our secret sins" are set before God. It does not say that they are, or should be, set before a search engine. The marriage of filthy behavior and total exposure is one of the less happy features of the postmodern era.

Spitzer's political career is over, and good riddance (his bad manners were allied to the most threadbare liberalism). If he wants redemption, he should study John Profumo, the English politician who was caught in a sex scandal in 1963 and spent the rest of his life in humble charitable work. By such means Spitzer could make recompense for the damage he has inflicted on his family, his prostitutes, and himself.