Nine years ago, I raised a question about Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, wondering if he had flunked recess in grade school. He seemed to have never gotten the hang of playing well with others.
It may be time to ask the same thing about Eliot Spitzer and his days at the Horace Mann School. In the playground known as Albany, the governor is now having an awfully hard time getting along with some of the other kids, especially the State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno.
Not that this comes as a shock. Mayor Giuliani and Governor Spitzer may belong to different political parties, but in key respects they are cut from the same cloth.
Both are supremely smart (and don’t mind letting you know it). Both are exceedingly ambitious. Both are imbued with a certain self-righteousness. In previous jobs — Mr. Giuliani as United States attorney, Mr. Spitzer as New York’s attorney general — both pursued targets with a zeal that may have at times exceeded the bounds of fair play.
In short, both have what might be called temperament issues, except that some New Yorkers who disliked Mr. Giuliani’s style find the same traits somehow admirable in Mr. Spitzer. Those people are usually called Democrats.
But even some of his fellow Democrats are shaking their heads over Mr. Spitzer’s ferocity in taking on Mr. Bruno. Not that the Republican Senate leader is without blemish. He is under federal investigation, and he, too, has a mouth on him. For years, he has been one of the reasons that “Albany” and “dysfunctional” often appear side by side in political analyses.
Turning the hard-edged Mr. Bruno into a sympathetic figure is quite a trick. But Mr. Spitzer has managed to pull it off. When you are 48 and born to wealth (that would be the governor) and you harshly attack someone who is 78 and self-made (that would be Mr. Bruno), rounding up a large cheering section doesn’t come easy.
A few days ago, The New York Post quoted an unidentified state senator as saying that Mr. Spitzer, in a phone conversation, described Mr. Bruno as “old” and “senile” in singularly vulgar language. On Saturday, the governor said the conversation was not “as described,” but yesterday, he sidestepped the question entirely.
This might be dismissed as a case of he said/he said, except that it is hardly the first time that someone has told of Spitzerian unpleasantness only to run into denials from Mr. Spitzer or his aides. The pattern is unmistakable, and not easily ignored.
John C. Whitehead, the former Goldman Sachs chairman, said in 2005 that he had been threatened by Mr. Spitzer for defending a business leader under investigation by the attorney general. “ ‘It’s now a war between us, and you’ve fired the first shot,’ ” Mr. Whitehead, now 85, said Mr. Spitzer told him. “ ‘I will be coming after you. You will pay the price.’ ”
On that occasion, too, Mr. Spitzer denied uttering those words, though he later acknowledged that he might have handled the situation “more judiciously.”
William J. Larkin Jr., a Republican state senator, said Attorney General Spitzer had once threatened during a dispute to cut Mr. Larkin’s head off. An aide to Mr. Spitzer called the story untrue.
Last week, Mr. Bruno said that during a particularly angry exchange, the governor threatened him by saying, “ ‘I’m going to knock you down so that you will never get up.’ ” Presumably, Mr. Spitzer was speaking metaphorically. Mr. Bruno may be 78, but he is a former Army boxing champion.
And then there is Mr. Spitzer’s often-quoted warning to a Republican assemblyman that he is a “steamroller” who will run over opponents. He modified “steamroller” with an all-too-familiar profanity, apparently to show what a tough guy he can be. On this one, there were none of the usual denials from the governor or his staff.
IN defense of his temperament, Mr. Spitzer has said, “You will not change the world by whispering.” Maybe not. But you also might not change it if the people whose support you need write you off as “a bully” and an “overgrown kid,” prone to “tantrums” and “mean-spirited” behavior. The words in quotation marks are from Mr. Bruno.
Of course, the governor may not care what Mr. Bruno says, and instead may find comfort in this advice: “You must guard against arrogance,” but also “accept that maybe you really do know better and can see a little further down the road than others.”
Those words are from a 2002 book called “Leadership,” by a fellow named Giuliani.
