OUR VIEW: Spitzer poll hits the pits

Opinion

November 14, 2007

Anonymous The Tonawanda News Wed Nov 14, 2007, 10:19 PM EST

Well, that didn’t take long.

A new Siena College Research Institute poll of registered voters shows that Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s job performance rating is virtually two-to-one negative and, for the first time ever, more voters now view him unfavorably than view him favorably. If the 2010 gubernatorial election were today, only 25 percent of voters are prepared to re-elect Eliot Spitzer, while 49 percent prefer someone else.

It was just a year ago that the governor won election with 69 percent of the vote. But that was when Spitzer was perceived at something of a political superhero. As attorney general, he battled the bad guys on Wall Street and helped citizens with their consumer problems. During his honeymoon period the governor’s positive rating went as high as 75 percent.

The honeymoon is over.

The Spitzer administration’s involvement in using state police investigators to spy on the state Senate majority leader and his self-characterization as a “steamroller” when addressing the Assembly’s top Republican started the governor’s downhill slide.

But what put his stature into a virtual free fall was his plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. According to the poll, seven in ten New York voters who have read or heard about the governor’s proposal continue to oppose his original plan and nearly two-thirds oppose his revised three-tiered license plan.

Spitzer has since backed off that idea. Even his retraction smells more of politics (getting Hillary Clinton out of a tight spot) than a realization that rewarding illegal aliens was downright stupid.

The governor is becoming famous for having an arrogant streak, a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. The next three years will determine if Spitzer will learn the lessons of his first or if his personality continues to get the better of his good judgment, continuing the slide in his popularity.

We hope that Spitzer wakes up and realizes that he is not a dictator, he’s a governor and needs to govern as part of democracy in Albany. It’s early in his first term; plenty of time to make sure that his first term is not his last.

The turnaround has been striking. And it happened, as characterized by the authors of the poll, in a New York minute.

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