A Real Man's Apology

Most women wanted to hear one thing on Wednesday from Eliot Spitzer.

We didn't care about his future plans to serve "the public good," his lamenting "what could have been" or how bad he felt about letting down his fellow New Yorkers.

No.

First and foremost, we wanted this philandering hypocrite of a husband to step up to the microphone and turn, not toward the cameras, but toward his devastated wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, and say, "I am so sorry I did this to you."

To you.

Not to "my family," as he couched it on Monday.

Not to "my wife," which is how he framed it on Tuesday, as if his partner of 21 years were not standing next to him.

No.

We wanted him to take a whole five seconds of his 140-second statement to pay tribute to the wife who, at his request, would endure the predictable onslaught of blame, judgment and ridicule to stand by his side and not slug him on national television.

That, however, is not what he did. Instead, the Democratic governor did what powerful men always do when their astonishing degree of power isn't power enough and they decide to lob a grenade at what matters most.

He scrunched up his face, bit his lip and talked in code.

"Words cannot express ..."

"From those to whom much is given ..."

"I will try once again ..."

Then he escorted his wife out of the room without answering a single question.

He used to have a lot to say about her.

"The fact that she believed in me enough to put her very promising legal career on hold was a great source of inspiration," he said in a New York Times interview during his 2006 campaign for governor.

After the election, he told the paper, "At the end of every day, there's the inevitable recounting of what I was doing and where we're heading on different issues ... ."

Well, maybe not every day.

We don't know where his wife thought he was on Feb. 13, when he reportedly met up with a hooker in a Washington hotel. And while he apparently knew on Friday that he was about to be outed as Client No. 9 of the high-priced prostitution ring, he waited until Sunday to tell his wife. In the interim, reporters said he was his typical glad-handing self at Saturday's Gridiron dinner in Washington.

Why?

Why couldn't this public figure admit to the damage he has done to his wife and to his marriage after he recklessly charged forth with sword in hand? And, please, enough with the half-baked theories meant to explain away such marital betrayal as a) inevitable, b) excusable or c) understandable.

There's been considerable chest-thumping from men insisting that, hey, Eliot Spitzer is a man, and a man has needs, wink-wink.

"Big deal. Married man goes to prostitute," Harvard-educated lawyer Alan Dershowitz told MSNBC. When it comes to sex, he said, "men don't use their brains. They think with a different part of their body, and that part of the body, the level of brains, there (is) no relationship to the level of brains in the skull, unfortunately ..." Apparently, he skipped anatomy.

Talk show host Bill Maher said we were "overthinking" Spitzer's behavior. "People need sex, and married people generally aren't getting it," he wrote on The Huffington Post.

Democratic operative James Carville told CNN, "I think the press needs to look into why we are sitting here going crazy on this about a man hooking up with a prostitute. It's not the first time it has happened."

In other words, we're supposed to understand — option c), remember? — that Spitzer is just a real man.

But a real man doesn't ask his wife to humiliate herself for the sake of his career.

A real man knows when to turn to his wife and say, "This time, honey, you stay home."

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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