For about a week, my wife was obsessed with Eliot Spitzer.

There’s something about a hypocrite that really sets her off. But even seeing a hypocrite served a plate of cold comeuppance does not fully explain Kari’s particular case of schadenfreude. There have been plenty of politicians, often of the moral majority flavor, – David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Duke Cunningham – caught either figuratively or literally with their pants down that have failed to elicit the same level of glee from her in their respective falls.

Raised working-class, Kari has a natural aversion to entitlement. The fact that Spitzer’s girls were $4,000-an-hour hookers paid out of some trust fund did not help him in Kari’s consideration of the facts at hand. But her fascination with the case preceded her knowledge of his personal finances.

That she seems so animated in watching Spitzer self-immolate could be considered especially surprising since he is a Democrat. Kari makes little secret – indeed she is quite proud – that her politics are left-of-the-dial. Kari reported almost hourly updates about the unfolding details of the Spitzer affair from the moment it was reported on the “New York Times” Web site until he resigned one week and a political eternity, later. What does $4,000-an-hour buy, exactly? And yet she was almost oblivious when Vitter, a focus-in-the-family-style southern conservative gets caught paying prostitutes (with the exponentially more embarrassing allegations of his particular fetish). Spitzer, the New York liberal, should be the exception to Kari’s derision, not its most pilloried target. In her measure of people, Kari never lets political expedience trump morality. The man cheated on his wife with hookers. Period. 

Figuring out why is one of the reasons why I love my wife so much. 

Why Spitzer? It’s not just hypocrisy, per se. It has a lot to do with the flavor of hypocrisy. Or at least I think it does.

We of the liberal persuasion almost take it for granted that the politicians that trade on religious conservatism are hypocrites. For one thing, they can’t seem to keep from getting caught doing what they condemn. There is also the curious dynamic of why someone who, for instance, thinks homosexuality is an abomination yet can’t stop talking about it – gay people don’t think about homosexual sex as much as these “moralists” do.

But Spitzer was a different kind of moralist. He was one whose moral code aligned more closely with Kari’s own: that the wealthy and the corporations they operate play by a different set of rules that stacks the deck in their favor and that one of the functions of government is to act as a counterbalance to the power and tools available to the rich.

As New York’s Attorney General he exposed the organized crime syndicates operated in plain sight and traded on the Wall Street stock exchanges. There was a sense that Spitzer went after such abuses not just because they are illegal, but also because they are morally wrong.

Rather than immediately conjure some right-wing conspiracy (the Bush-controlled Justice department using the crusty old Mann Act to investigate a political enemy, for instance) to defend Spitzer, Kari was never confused about who was at fault and not shy about sharing that opinion.

The reality is I only have the faintest idea of how her mind works and only the broadest outlines of her personal moral code. She keeps me on my toes and keeps me guessing. In a word, she keeps me interested.

With each passing controversy, from Britney Spears to Spitzer to Hillary Clinton, to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I learn a little bit more about my wife. And after hearing her take, I love her a little bit more.

–Ward Peck