Vanity Fair is offering those of you who care a "sneak peek" at their January cover story, a David Margolick treatment of Eliot Spitzer's first year in Albany. In it, our steamrolling governor manages to both play fast and loose with accepted ethics as well as alienate his own party and the press. It reads mostly the way you'd guess—young Eliot was the cupcake-baking Tracy Flick of practically every realm he's entered. While in the sixth-grade at Horace Mann, he carried a Samsonite briefcase and guessed that only four of his classmates were smarter than he was. We're pretty sure we would have felt morally-obligated to kick his ass on sight.

"He wants to do a good job," heavyweight strategy-guy Hank Sheinkopf tells Margolick. "But ultimately what he really gives a shit about is whether Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and The New York Times love him, because, in the back of his brain, if they don't love him, he's nobody."

Governor, honey, we're okay, you're okay—mmkay?

Margolick isn't the first to point this out, but his story notes that Spitzer is portrayed in the 1990 Oscar-winning film, Reversal of Fortune, written by his mentor Alan Dershowitz. Playing Eliot? Annabella Sciorra and Felicity Huffman, who was perhaps doing some advanced prep for TransAmerica. "Hey, it's Hollywood," Margolick writes. Still, dude was played by chicks. Hard not to wonder how long Spitzer's goons were tailing that casting agent.