Eliot Spitzer: he's taken on Wall Street, two-timing insurance companies, and environmental abusers, fueling his image as a crusader for the little guy. Now he's gunning to become the next governor of New York—and he's just getting started. Edward Norton finds out what makes Spitzer run

EDWARD NORTON: Imagining your grown-up life when you were 15, what did you think you'd be doing?

ELIOT SPITZER: Not this. People presume that you only end up in a position like the one I'm in if you've spent your whole life focused on getting there. I had absolutely no expectation that I would be in elective office. But I used to talk about foreign affairs and foreign policy, and I read The New York Times cover to cover from the time I was 12. People thought it was kind of geekish.

EN: When you were younger, did you have any romantic sense of being a crusader for the public interest?

ES: I don't think I saw myself in that role, because I just didn't feel comfortable in it. I turned 9 in 1968, so I was a little young to appreciate the romanticism that emerged out of the '60s. The great leaders--the Kennedys and Martin Luther King--they were a bit before me.

EN: Can you think of early instances in which you felt admiration for a political leader?

ES: McGovern in '72. I was only 13, but I remember thinking, Here is somebody who is standing up and speaking out on an issue that needs to be addressed, and everybody else is hemming and hawing and saying, "Gee, we don't know quite what to do."

EN: I remember the Carter-Reagan debates, and part of what I absorbed is the intensity with which my grandfather and my father were watching, their sense of how important this was.

ES: I also remember in '68 the morning after the election, when I guess the California vote had not been fully resolved, getting up to go off to school, and looking at the TV. I couldn't believe Nixon was about to be elected president. I thought, Aren't we better than that?

EN: So what started to focus your sense of your own politics?

ES: Vietnam, Watergate, the fall of Nixon, the rise of an ideology--beginning in '76 when Ronald Reagan first ran for president--that I disagreed with in terms of the almost exclusive focus on individual wealth accretion.

EN: The Reagan Revolution.

ES: That's right. But, agree or disagree, President Reagan was able to differentiate himself and say, "Here's what we've been doing," with a simplicity that people grasped. We have seen in George W. Bush the limits and failure of that ideology. Bush has been completely vapid, devoid of any sensibility of what we need to do to invest in our nation. If you contrast the budgets that we had with Reagan and Nixon versus Bush, it's amazing how much Nixon and Reagan were willing to do in terms of health care, education ...

EN: Did you have a moment in your postcollegiate life where you made a choice between the private and the public sectors?

ES: I don't think they were epiphanies in the sense of a great intellectual recognition, but moments when there was, as they say, a fork in the road and I took it. One was when I went to a major New York City law firm, Paul, Weiss--a good, liberal firm in the sense that it had Democratic partners who voted the right way, contributed, were active socially. But what I was doing as a second-year associate was as establishment as you can imagine--representing major corporations in litigation and merger-and-acquisition cases. At the end of my first year there, I went to Arthur Liman, who was the great eminence of the firm, and said, "Arthur, I think I'm good at this, but it really isn't exciting me sufficiently."

EN: How old were you at that point?

ES: I was 26. Two years out of law school. He said, "You should go work for [New York District Attorney] Robert Morgenthau."

EN: Did Morgenthau become a mentor figure to you?

ES: He still is. He is now in his mid-eighties, has been the D.A. here forever. In his last reelection campaign--the first time he was challenged in any significant way in a great period of time--he used my picture in his campaign. Which was for me a thrill. So [in 1994], when Bob Abrams retired or resigned as attorney general, it was then that I said, "There is a job that has all sorts of possibilities." It was being terribly underutilized. I thought there was something more expansive that could be done with it, a more activist role that would demonstrate some overarching principles about the way society was supposed to function.

EN: Do you look at the opportunity to be governor as an extension of that impulse?

ES: Certainly being governor would take to a different level the challenges that I've tried to confront as attorney general, although the platform of attorney general maybe has been a better opportunity to speak about national issues such as integrity in the capital markets and environmental policy. A governor is like a CEO of an enterprise. You've got to run that enterprise, and you focus within your borders. But theoretically it's the same set of issues that I want to bring to the fore.

EN: What drives you to be governor?

ES: This sounds perhaps overly romantic, but to me, New York has always stood for a sense of opportunity and hope, and it's been the destination of individuals who have aspirations and believe that if they get here, they'll be able to fulfill them. But I've seen that faith begin to dissipate. There is a sense that the sun is setting and we have seen the dynamism that used to be captured by New York move to other destinations. New York state is losing population--people are voting with their feet. We've got to come back. I don't have any doubt we can do it.