Opinion: Poor Silda? Poor Cramer!
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Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s meteoric fall from power after being linked to a prostitution ring has come to a pretty spectacular crash — but instead of focusing on his smoldering career, the media’s gaze is lingering on his wife, Silda. From today’s Times:
It was the way she stood there, enduring.Silda Wall Spitzer did not say a word as her husband, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, brusquely apologized to his family and the public after he was allegedly caught on a wiretap doing business with a high-priced prostitution ring. Her face was drawn. But she took her husband’s hand as they left the room.
And of course, the question everyone seems to be asking is, why? What point is there in standing by your man?
Patt Morrison wanted Silda to ‘let him twist in the wind alone,’ and I’m not going to lie, I was kind of hoping she would leave him hanging at his resignation speech. Nevertheless, the bipolarity of the discussion is tiresome. Commentators either attack her integrity or demote her to Stepford status. Top of the Ticket says many women consider this ‘a hard-to-fathom decision’ even as other news sources sympathize with ‘The awful life of a political wife’ (though the New York Daily News objects heartily to that characterization). You’d think, with such a venerable American tradition of political sex scandals, we’d have some new angle to take.
The thing is, Spitzer’s standing by her husband may not be an admission of helplessness or a statement on self-respect. It could just be a big fat middle finger in the face of the media and her critics, since keeping her emotions to herself makes it harder for commentators to perform gleeful autopsies of her emotional state.
One person who isn’t holding back any tears, though, is ‘Mad Money’ host Jim Cramer. A longtime friend of the Spitzers, he had defended the governor when the story first surfaced, and seemed genuinely heartbroken over the sad affair. After watching an interview on the Today Show, I felt more sorry for him than I did for Silda:
Cramer was close to tears as he spoke about Silda Spitzer and the marriage he had observed as a close friend of both spouses. “I think she loves Eliot. I know he’s always worshipped her,” he said. “I don’t want to make any excuses for what he did. I can’t believe it. But she loved him. I feel bad for them. I feel bad for the girls. That’s what I said to him. I said, ‘Let me speak to Silda.’ It’s Silda that you feel bad for.” ... Cramer didn’t say he felt betrayed by his friend, but that was the implication as he struggled before the cameras to make sense of it all. “Look, I’ve just known them for a long time,” he concluded, his voice starting to choke. “I obviously didn’t know him as well as I thought.”
Sounds like it’s time for couples counseling.