While I was away, Harvey Pitt finally resigned as chairman of the SEC.
I had not bought into the criticism of Pitt for a long time. It seemed like a good idea to have possibly the nation's leading authority on securities law as SEC chair. The idea that Pitt was somehow to blame for the last year's accounting scandals was always risible - after all, almost all of the scandals concerned fraud which occurred before he took office. (See here for a quick summary, and click here and here for descriptions of why Pitt's predecessor, Arthur Levitt, should receive more blame than he has for those scandals.) And as Josh Marshall noted over the summer, the calls for Pitt's resignation at the time didn't "seem to have much to do with anything he's actually done" since his confirmation. Call me naive, but I think judgment of a man's job performance should have something to do with what he's actually done in that job.
But once he actually did something - i.e., botch the appointment of William Webster to the new accounting board badly enough to have the SEC investigate the decisions of its own chairman - his eviction was richly deserved.
I have followed this story with great interest. For those of my readers who don't already know, I am a relatively junior corporate lawyer at a law firm in New York. Harvey Pitt, who has forgotten more about the securities laws than I can ever hope to learn, is the type of figure that someone in my position would consider a role model. And yet I - or just about any junior, unknowledgable peon at a firm who would be quaking at the thought of a meeting in Pitt's office (in his previous life as a lawyer) - could have told him that it wasn't a great idea to ask Congress for a raise when most of its members are calling for his resignation, or that maybe, given the corporate scandals and the resulting sensitivity surrounding the acounting board (I'm leaving aside the issue of whether Webster was the right choice in the first place for the appointment), he should've mentioned to the rest of the commission that Webster was the director of a company that was embroiled in an accounting scandal. Seriously - what does that say about this supposed paragon's professional judgment, which is every bit as important to a lawyer as knowing the black-letter law?
I think Pitt has been, or should be, kicked off the role-model pedestal for such lack of judgment.
Daniel Gross has more on why Pitt's background as a corporate lawyer led to his downfall:

He has stumbled because he is behaving like a corporate lawyer in a political job, and because he still suffers from a major occupational illness of corporate lawyers: deep insecurity about his place in the business world.
...The dirty secret about corporate lawyers is that they are essentially high-paid servants: on call, beholden to clients, fungible, solicitous, and yet privately jealous of the people who pay their bills. Bit players in corporate dramas, they operate on the clock and in the shadows. The covers of Fortune and Forbes and the glories of stock options are foreign to them. Even the most accomplished lawyers lack the public respect, power, and compensation of CEOs. As chairman of the accounting board, Biggs would easily have outshined Pitt.
Pitt's larger disinclination to speak truth to power might also be traced to his profession. Levitt never hesitated to stick it to his former colleagues on Wall Street. But as a rule, partners at law firms don't tell their clients to stuff it—it's bad business. After he assumed office, when former clients like KPMG Chairman Eugene O'Kelley asked to meet with him, Pitt agreed, despite the appearance problem it created.

While I'm not yet in a high-powered position comparable to Pitt's, Gross' points sound pretty plausible. I still think that such incentives could and should have been overcome by better judgment on Pitt's part.
The most stunning thing in Gross' piece was the following:

Pitt lacks the attribute most beneficial to a businessperson turned government official: go-to-hell money. In the private sector, having enough cash in the bank tends to liberate you to speak your mind. Levitt has go-to-hell money. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Jon Corzine have it. So do Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the two most free-speaking Cabinet members of the current administration. Sure, Pitt may have made $3 million a year as a partner at his old law firm. But that's not big money. Like most senior attorneys, if Pitt wants to grow old and prosper, he needs to maintain his viability in the system.

Let's get this straight. A pre-appointment $3 million salary isn't enough money to give the head of the SEC enough standing in the system to be a proper regulator? Gross doesn't define what would be enough, but it seems that you need at least in excess of eight figures in the bank to stand up to the accountants and CEOs. So practically speaking, there's a fairly massive wealth test for a job like SEC chair.
Sounds like a job for McCain-Feingold! Seriously, why aren't campaign-finance reform types up in arms about this? It's not as if Harvey Pitt has the option to get donations from any legal source to make up for his comparative poverty...