Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria is certainly an agent of change when it comes to rehabilitating disgraced premium-call-girl client Eliot Spitzer’s reputation. On his Sunday CNN show Fareed Zakaria GPS, he introduced a Spitzer interview by hailing the Mayflower Hotel john’s great foresight in seeing the 2008 crisis in its germinal stages:

This has been another week of outrage over Wall Street. But mixed in with the outrage, there continues to be a bewilderment about how these problems in the financial industry could have been piling up without warning.
When being briefed by academics from the London School of Economics, Queen Elizabeth II asked a simple question: Why did nobody notice it?
In fact, some people did notice it. Warren Buffett, Paul Volcker and others did warn about the danger of derivatives and debt. Others warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
But through all these warnings, the markets kept rising. Financial firms minted money. The naysayers looked like fuddy-duddies, and the risk-takers like geniuses. No one likes to fight success.
Actually, there was one guy who took on the financial firms at the height of their prestige and power when the country, the media and Washington were gushing with admiration.
That man was Eliot Spitzer.
And he is my guest today, for his first interview since resigning as governor of New York.
You remember him as the governor of New York who resigned after a scandal involving prostitution. But think back before then. He was the attorney general of New York who went after Merrill Lynch, prosecuted AIG and several other institutions for practices he argued were corrupt, fraudulent and illegal. Those prosecutions were deeply controversial, and Spitzer made most of Wall Street his enemy.
I’m going to talk to him about what he thinks about the world he’s watching today.

“A scandal involving prostitution”? Is that the most precise language Zakaria can manage? Spitzer was the enemy of “corrupt and illegal” financial manipulators, but when it came to his own moral corruption and illegalities, Spitzer sounded a different tone:

ZAKARIA: You know, there are a number of people watching who are going to say, Eliot Spitzer doesn’t have credibility to talk about these issues, because of what happened over the last year with your own behavior. What would you say to them?
SPITZER: I would say to them that I never held myself out as being anything other than human. I have flaws, as we all do, arguably. I failed in a very important way in my personal life, and I have paid a price for that. I have spent a year with my family, with my wonderful and amazing and forgiving wife and three daughters, and have rebuilt those relationships, and hope to do that as time goes on.
I also feel that, to the extent, if I’m asked, and I can contribute to a very important conversation, I will do that as well. That is our right, arguably our obligation as citizens. I will do what I can, and with full awareness and heaviness of heart about what I did.
ZAKARIA: But it wasn’t just a personal failing. There were also legal issues involved…
SPITZER: Well, those were not pursued by those who decided to pursue them.