DAILY BEAST: Eliot Spitzer ended his failed experiment as a prime-time television personality Wednesday night with a quotation from another former New York governor. He signed off his final installment of CNN’s In the Arena with an excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena.”
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,” the beanpole-ish, balding Spitzer declaimed after donning some black-framed reading glasses. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again; because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Spitzer, to be sure, was risking an invidious comparison. Like Roosevelt, another ex-lawman who strove early in his career to stamp out corruption, his time as governor was cut short in the middle of his first term. But unlike T.R., who departed Albany triumphantly to become vice president and then president of the United States, Spitzer was forced to resign in disgrace, amid a shocking prostitution scandal in March 2008, and then spent many feverish months trying to rehabilitate himself as a public figure.
EDITOR: We will miss his commentary.
I will miss his commentary as well. Although I gave up on commercial television 6 years ago, I do get his commentary on the CNN website,YouTube video clips, etc. and thought he did a great job.