Digital Brainwaves

Eliot Spitzer appears to have seen the light.

Call me pessimistic, though, but I wager it was only somewhat for the right reasons.

I’ve written before about the New York governor’s plans to issue driver licenses to illegal aliens, referring to it at the time as “so unbelievably stupid of an idea that it’s almost beyond words.”

Spitzer intends, according to his spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, to drop this license plan in an announcement later today.

There were a lot of reasons to drop the plan, and many of them were really good. For one, a Siena College poll put statewide opposition to the plan at 72%. Oh, and there’s the little tidbit about the whole plan being illegal under current state law (New York State Vehicle and Traffic Law, Title 5, Article 19, Section 502 – yes, I looked it up ):

In addition, the commissioner also shall require that the applicant provide his or her social security number and provide space on the application so that the applicant may register in the New York state organ and tissue donor registry under section forty-three hundred ten of the public health law.

(Emphasis mine)

I’m not sure either of those were the key thing that got him to reconsider the plan.

No, I strongly suspect that the proverbial straw for the camel’s back was the one-two punch from the Siena link above that, for the first time since February 2005 (when Spitzer was still New York’s Attorney General), his Siena poll unfavorable rating has exceeded his favorable rating (41% favorable, 46% unfavorable), and only 25% of those polled would plan to vote him in for a second term.

It’s amazing what one can do when threatened with one’s job.