Stringer and Spitzer Slug it Out Eliot Spitzer and Scott Stringer battled through their second New York City comptroller debate on Monday evening. It was an ugly, uninspiring event. One expects to be joyless in the company of Mr. Spitzer, the former governor, from whom negativity and belligerence flow bounteously, as from a deep Artesian source. But he was matched note for sour note by Mr. Stringer, normally the mild-mannered policy guy, who is down in the polls and battling for his life against a better-known and far richer rival. The debate shed little to no light on the job either would do as comptroller, though Mr. Stringer made solid points when suggesting it might be unwise for voters to trust the judgment of an ex-pol who resigned in a prostitution scandal. He was also right to ask where Mr. Spitzer has been for the last five difficult years. While Mr. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, was fighting on behalf for public-housing tenants and other New Yorkers, Mr. Spitzer was making money and being a talk-show host. Mr. Spitzer did his best to summon memories of his sterling record as state attorney general, but his description of himself as a lonely voice of virtue was galling. So was the way he cited old editorials in The New York Times as evidence of how impressed we supposedly still are with his failed campaign to win driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. Well, I happen to have the New York Times editorial board right here: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD (to Mr. Spitzer): We heard what you were saying. You know nothing of our work. Yes, we praised Mr. Spitzer for supporting driver's licenses for the undocumented, which, then as now, is a bold and smart policy move. But we also wrote a 2007 editorial saying he "caved" on this issue under the headline "Governor Spitzer Retreats." When Mr. Spitzer tells the driver's-license story, he plays down the ending. He failed to win support in the Legislature for the plan, and ultimately reversed himself. Immigrant advocates had spent years carefully laying the groundwork for a driver's-license campaign, but Mr. Spitzer's ineptitude set the cause way back. New York State still does not give driver's licenses to immigrants, though a growing number of other states do. Go Utah! Mr. Spitzer's attack on Mr. Stringer as a craven took of special interests was particularly outrageous. "I'm just trying to keep up with you," Mr. Spitzer told Mr. Stringer, "keep up with the money you're going to spend, and all the millions of dollars that your allies on Wall Street and the political plutocracy have said they're going to spend." This from a candidate who paints his resignation as an act of personal accountability, and his self-financed campaign as an example of fiscal virtue. A candidate who blew up his governorship, and betrayed every New Yorker who ever believed in him, to serve one special interest: himself. "We have within us all drives, urges," he said on "Charlie Rose," by way of explanation. Mr. Spitzer is asking voters to forget the scandals and to look at "the totality of my record" - but if A is his record as attorney general, B is his governorship, C is escorts, D is his self-resurrection as comptroller, and so on, then it seems he just wants you to consider the totality of his record from A to B.