Slate Wants You -- If You're Erudite But Plagued By Scandal

Is Slate becoming the highbrow equivalent of VH1's Celebrity Rehab? It's a fair question to ask now that the online magazine has hired disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer to pen an ongoing column. You might recall that a few years back, Slate rehabbed someone else with a tarnished reputation to be a columnist: Henry Blodget, the former Merrill Lynch analyst who became the poster-child for the investment excesses of the dot-com boom.

Weisberg's hiring of Blodget, first, followed by Spitzer, is genius. It's a way for Slate to go tabloid while at the same time maintaining its editorial quality. Eliot Spitzer writing about the rise of the Chinese now -- which he did in his first column on Wednesday -- will garner far more readers than if Eliot Spitzer had written the same thing before l'affaire Dupre. Ashley Dupre doesn't even have to be mentioned. That's a nifty trick.

What makes Slate's hiring of Spitzer even more delicious is that Blodget and Spitzer have some infamous shared history: Spitzer sued Bldoget for securities fraud. The irony of both men being part of Slate's rehab project is hardly lost on Blodget, who wished Spitzer a warm welcome to the online mag's team on his Silicon Valley Insider blog earlier this week:

About five years ago, a then-little-known Attorney General named Eliot Spitzer got me kicked out of the securities industry. Shortly thereafter, during a period when I was sure that, among other things, no one would ever be caught dead professionally associating with me again, an editor named Jacob Weisberg at Slate reached out a hand. With a big smile, Jacob said he liked the idea of my launching my "comeback" (his word) by covering the Martha Stewart trial for the magazine, and he couldn't wait to begin ...

... And now I see that Slate has a new columnist: a very well-known ex-Governor named Eliot Spitzer, who has recently had a rough patch of his own. I can imagine Jacob Weisberg's huge grin as he signed up his newest reputationally-challenged charge, and I can imagine Eliot's appreciation in return. And now that several bizarrely connected twists of fate have placed all three of us on the same team, I can't wait to shake both of their hands.