In Addition to Rampant Whoring Around, Was Spitzer Fast Becoming a Lush?

New York Magazine has a long but fascinating item about the rapid downfall of Eliot Spitzer.

I had not realized he was on his way to becoming an honorary Kennedy. For all the psychobabble about how he could throw his career away on some hookers, could it well be the guy has much more deep-rooted problems heretofore unknown?

Sure appears that way.

This part jumped off the page.

Yet even as his gubernatorial hand grew stronger, signs of personal trouble were growing harder to ignore. Did Spitzer even want to be governor? Every time things were looking good, he’d screw himself. One longtime close associate says that Spitzer’s drinking increased significantly. “He definitely drank a lot more, even from two years ago,” the aide says, “and much more than when he was A.G. He’s a Scotch drinker.”

Spitzer loved to back up his tough-guy credentials by saying he’d grown up “in the Bronx.” And that’s technically true. But Riverdale is a long way, in every meaningful respect, from Morrisania. Spitzer was inescapably a product of wealth, Horace Mann, Princeton, and Harvard. And it hurt when Bruno, who really did brawl his way up from poverty, taunted Spitzer as a “rich spoiled brat.” Compounding the humiliation, last year, in the midst of the greatest and most prolonged losing streak of his life, he needed help from his wife to get out of the ditch.

Spitzer, says a friend, has always been attracted to “rough-around-the-edges types, dese-dem-dose kinds of guys.” If Spitzer could never be an authentic, old-school neighborhood guy, at least his money could buy himself a taste of the edgy, subterranean life. For years Spitzer had been reckless—in his foulmouthed conversation, in his contempt for his adversaries, in his use of the power he’d been given as attorney general. But when he found himself thwarted as governor, Spitzer’s recklessness sloshed over into his personal life.

Read the whole thing. Most interesting.