Announcing the "Adam Smith, Esq." Monthly Book Review 

I'm pleased to announce what will be a new, regular feature here on "Adam Smith, Esq.:"  The Monthly Book Review.

What's the Monthly Book Review all about?  Here's what I have in mind:

• I'll review a book that has at least a tangential relationship to the fundamental subject of our conversation at "Adam Smith, Esq.," although I reserve the right to push our mental boundaries a bit farther afield.   Primarily, I envision covering books on (non-academic) economics, on prominent figures in the law or pieces of legal history, and also the occasional volume that just begs for wider attention.  Reader nominations for books I might review are more than welcome, but as always I reserve the right to choose what I'll write about and, as they say, "the decision of the judges is final."
• The reviews will be archived, cunningly enough, under the new "Book Reviews (Monthly)" category.
• I have zero financial interest in promoting any of the books I'll be selecting, and neither my choice of books to cover nor what I have to say is remotely for sale.  I may seek a sponsor of this feature, but even if I do they will have no influence over the selection of books or, needless to say, the content of my reviews.
• A quick synopsis of each month's book review will appear as well in the monthy e-newsletter—yet another reason to sign up if you haven't already.

So, without further preface, to this month's review.

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"Spoiling for a Fight:  The Rise of Eliot Spitzer," by Brooke Masters, is this month's subject. 

Henry Holt and Co. 368 pages $26.00 Hardcover

Times Books Pub Date: 07/2006 ISBN: 0-8050-7961-0

Who is Brooke Masters?  According to the dust jacket:

"Brooke Masters is a staff writer for The Washington Post, based in New York, where she writes about financial services and white-collar crime. She has reported on the trials of Martha Stewart, Frank Quattrone, and Bernard Ebbers. In her sixteen years at the Post, she has also covered criminal justice, education, and politics. A graduate of Harvard University and the London School of Economics, she lives in Mamaroneck, New York, with her husband and two children."

Brooke Masters is also the quintessentially even-handed, reportorial, journalistic author:  Even-handed to a fault.  Indeed, the book's greatest failing is that she never draws her own conclusions about Spitzer; the typical reader will probably come away with precisely the view of Spitzer that they started with, an abdication of the author's prerogative to offer a reasoned opinion on a topic they have presumably become intimately familiar with.

But back to Spitzer:  In 2003, Stephen Cutler, then head of the SEC's Enforcement Division, offered a roast of Spitzer, quoting from an email Spitzer purportedly sent to the Almighty:  "Dear God," he began, "it's my understanding that you are everywhere, including, apparently, the State of New York.  As I read the Stamp Act of 1785, you are subject to regulation and taxation by the state of New York."

The barb scores two points:  Spitzer has a preternaturally broad view of his powers, and often relies on dusty and obscure statutes to achieve his ends (most famously, New York State's amazingly capacious 1921 Martin Act, an all-purpose anti-fraud enactment). 

Since the odds are staggering, barring some inconceivable meltdown between now and November, that Spitzer will be the next Governor of my home state of New York, it would be nice to learn who he really is.  Is he, on the one hand, a crusader who has stepped into a regulatory vacuum to uphold the rights of consumers and investors or, as detractors would have it, an overzealous and arrogant bully with a personal agenda that tramples the rights of defendants—and who is famously unsuccessful whenever he actually has to go to court, as opposed to conducting his prosecutions by press release and showboating press conferences?  Good question.  While it may be unfair for Masters to duck the question, I can sympathize from one perspective, at least:  When if Spitzer becomes Governor, he'll have to face a milieu completely and utterly different than any one he seems to have inhabited heretofore, meaning balanced budgets and legislative compromise.

Masters begins with what you discover is one of the best parts of the entire book:  Spitzer's upbringing.  His father, the son of an Austrian Jewish immigrant, was a self-made real estate millionaire, and Eliot and his two siblings grew up in the affluent Riverdale section of the Bronx (in the eyes of some, a spiritual annex of the Upper West Side), enrolled in private schools and submersed in progressive politics.  As a teenager, his reading tastes embraced Foreign Affairs, but not Playboy.   What life must have been like in Chez Spitzer growing up is perhaps best captured by a Princeton classmate of Spitzer's who later recounted that he had never studied as hard for a Princeton exam as he had for "dinner with the Spitzers." 

After Princeton and Harvard Law, he joined the office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and his appetite for the prosecutor's zealous reformist life was born.   And he takes to it like a true natural.

Fabulously revealing was his keynote speech before Instituional Investor magazine's annual awards dinner for top research analysts in November, 2001 at the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park, just as the scale of the spectacular dot-com implosion was becoming clear.   Preparing for the speech, his office spent weeks compiling every buy or sell recommendation is sued by the analysts to be honored and built a database to determine how individual i nvestors would have fared by following every one.  You can imagine the result.

Came the event, and Spitzer waded right in: 

"When measured by the performance of their stock recommendations, only one of this year's fifty-one first-team all-stars included in the study ranked first in their sector...  More than 40% of this year's first-team all-stars did not perform as well as the average analyst for their sector."

As things went downhill from there, more than one guest departed muttering things along the lines of "I'm not going to sit here and listen to this s---."

He may have bearded the lion in its own den, so to speak, but at least you can say this for him:  He had the goods.

This may, indeed, be the source of Spitzer's evident political appeal.  People seem to sense that he stands for something he believes in, and that, whatever his shortcomings, he doesn't vacillate and doesn't lack vision. 

Is Spitzer in the tradition of Louis Brandeis, or of Teddy Roosevelt and other turn of the century trust-busters who were Republicans, and presumably pro-business in their hearts?  Is he trying to save capitalism from itself?  Masters points out that Spitzer has written in The New Republic that the future of the Democratic Party depends on its ability "to promote government as a supporter of free markets, not simply a check on them," and that Spitzer describes himself as a "pragmatic liberal" or "progressive—by which I mean an effort to create opportunity within the market environment."

Spitzer keeps a framed photo of TR in his office, and when asked why, responds:  "I invoke him for the notion that capitalists understand when the market needs to be tamed."

Fascinating, brilliant, intense, and driven:  Precisely the ingredients for saints, and for madmen.