Spitzer -- Just a thought

When I read Nick Paumgarten's Eliot Spitzer profile in the New Yorker last December, the following sentence in bold (my emphasis) made me wonder if Paumgarten had ever been to Rhode Island, but I guess, given this week's revelations, he knew what he was talking about:

The capital [of New York], Albany, is at the joint of the L, and seems to benefit—thrive would be too strong a word—whichever way the fortune flows, but it is still remote, in the way of capitals, like Brasília or Canberra, that were designed not to favor one constituency over another, except perhaps the one in residence. As such, Albany is the arbiter in New York’s ceaseless upstate-downstate tug-of-war, which simultaneously pits rural Republicans against big-city liberals, and Rust Belt Democrats against supply-side suburbanites. The proliferation of cross-purposes and strange bedfellows makes for pernicious and complicated arbitrating. This is one (but far from the only) reason that Albany is home to what may be the most dysfunctional state government in the nation.