Compared with governor, city comptroller is obviously a downwardly mobile plunge, but Spitzer said he has long appreciated the ability of the office to shape public policy, impose accountability on the budgetary process, and, with its critical role in managing more than $100 billion in public employee-pension funds, wield influence on Wall Street and how large corporations govern themselves.
Asked about reports that his time in the wilderness has made him more mature since he resigned as governor in March 2008, he laughed and said, “That may have been a low threshold.”
Spitzer told me he would be an activist comptroller who would attend stockholder meetings on occasion and offer his two cents, whether solicited or not, on who should be appointed to the boards of various corporations in which New York City’s pension funds hold stock. “In my book, I say that ownership trumps regulation and ownership trumps prosecution as a way to get good governance in corporate America,” Spitzer said.
When Spitzer gets elected and gets to run the NYC pension funds, the people (you know who they are) who claim that state and local pension funds are run by saints--not union thugs and Democrat pols--will have some explaining to do. Spitzer will be the highest profile political hack running a pension fund, but he's hardly alone. Spitzer will be the highest profile politician running a pension fund to benefit the Democrat Party, but he won't be the only one.
