Dude, Go To The Bookstore, Dig Around The History Section, Grab A Paperback Of “Profiles In Courage” And Throw That Baby On The Coffee Table Before Anything Else Stupid Happens . . .

For illumination on Eliot Spitzer’s floundering governorship, look no further than his reading list:

Rudolph W. Giuliani has been talking up the new book by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Mitt Romney reads Thomas L. Friedman on globalization and Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln. John McCain quotes from Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

What about Eliot Spitzer?

Flying back from an environmental summit in Portugal this fall, he devoured a 40-year-old biography of one of his predecessors as governor of New York — a Republican, Charles Evans Hughes.

The book is subtitled “Politics and Reform in New York,” a vanilla description of Hughes’s destructive struggle with the State Legislature after his election in 1906 to the first of two two-year terms. It is one of several political histories Mr. Spitzer has read lately; another was Robert A. Slayton’s biography of Gov. Alfred E. Smith.

. . .

If Mr. Spitzer figures that all his problems will evaporate if Democrats seize control of the State Senate next November (for the first time since 1965), history says he might want to be careful about what he wishes for. Hughes’s chief adversaries were his fellow Republicans.

Robert Wesser, who wrote “Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910” (Cornell University Press, 1967), concluded that he was insecure as a politician and ineffective as a party reformer. He would not bargain with lawmakers. And when he appealed directly to the voters, he “moved ahead of public opinion and never efficiently enlisted its support.”

Topping his political reform agenda was legislation to let the voters, instead of boss-dominated conventions, nominate statewide candidates. But all Hughes had to show for his dramatic battle for his direct primary bill, Mr. Wesser wrote, “was the satisfaction of having made the fight, not having won it.”

Jeez, even Bush knows to at least tell people he’s reading that massive Alexander Hamilton biography no one can seem to finish . . .