Message failure has always plagued Eliot Spitzer, governor and accused sex exporter.

On Tuesday, day two of his scandal, his camp began reaching out to crisis management professionals—what we used to call publicists.

But Spitzer & Co. were a day late and at least $2,721.41 short. At least his people recognized—and, probably more difficultly, convinced Spitzer—that someone needed to clean up his senseless public mess.

Unfortunately for Mr. Spitzer, at least one major firm turned him down on Tuesday as a client, according to an industry specialist. There was nothing that they thought they could do for him.

His sex-ring circus displays his greatest failure of articulation yet.

Back in the attorney general’s office, he had people who could decently interpret him for the public and the press.

And one-on-one, he was at least so-so while glad-handing and talking to voters. During his campaign for governor, I came upon him chatting comfortably about Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) with two youngsters in Long Island.

(Then Hillary Clinton—Ha-ha, she was campaigning for reelection as senator! Funner days!—showed up, and they got manhandled by the press. “You get an idea of what Eliot and I go through,” Mrs. Clinton said. Well, he actually didn’t know yet himself—but now he does.)

But Spitzer takes no counsel. His management of press and language this week has been atrocious.

He is going it alone—in a city that offers, for better or for worse, the world’s foremost experts on public crisis management. (He is not, at least, being advised by the top firms.)

Alec Baldwin, for one, is still beloved—even though, you may recall, a possibly career-destroying voice mail was made public not long ago, one in which he called his daughter a “thoughtless little pig.”

Jim McGreevey was managed every step of the way and has emerged almost reputable—even though he, you know, tried to take down the state of New Jersey.

And who else? Jesus, everyone else.

So shortly after 2 p.m. on Monday, the New York Times Web site announced in a headline: “Spitzer is Linked to Prostitution Ring.”

This was already an extreme failure of message-crafting. That headline suggested even worse than what turned out to be the case. All you could think about was his pale thin chest. And pimps. And sleaze.

This was according to “an administration official,” one that should be fired for his or her incompetence for letting the story go out like that.

Not that that matters now.

Online, The Times said, all day: “Spitzer linked to sex ring.” Terrible! On paper, on Tuesday, at least it included the phrase “as a client.” Better.

He was not dealing with the press, even in his Manhattan pressroom on Monday afternoon, up on the 38th floor of 633 Third Avenue, with the blinds closed.

A spirited discussion took place among the photographers about misdemeanors and felonies, streetwalkers and prostitutes. “How many L’s, how many T’s, in Eliot?” asked a Times reporter.

There was a false alarm when the door at the front of the hot room opened, and everyone jumped. This was an upsetting place to be.

“Unless he resigns right now,” said a reporter. “No, he won’t,” said another.

“Tomorrow the Post will have pictures of him with the prostitutes,” one reporter teased a New York Post reporter. (They did not, somehow.)

It happened. There was pandemonium after a brief statement. Spitzer read terribly. Reuters in the second row, the AP in the third on the aisle, another New York Post boy in the third. Spitzer’s wife also stared at his speech.

She looked like she’d been beaten with a sock of oranges all night.

This speech was one of the most terrible, upsetting things I’ve ever seen.

His eyes were red and deep-set. His posture was all crazy, his shoulders were high. And no one knew what the words meant.

Nothing about this was reassuring.

“What did you do!” yelled a reporter—this was New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, in the front row. On tape, it sounded like: “What did she do?”

(Peyser had run 12 blocks to get there, and it paid off in seating. It was remarkable how long it took reporters to arrive. I was at home in the East Village, eating some cheese, and saw the Times story after it had been online for five minutes. It took me another 15 minutes to get the right address for the office—and I still made it into the second row.)

The reporters asked if he was resigning but he was already gone. Contrary to the quick update that The Times made to their story, he did not slam the door, he merely closed it.

The reporters were already filing. One barked into his phone: “When the door opened up, he had his arm around his wife. They were finishing an embrace as the door opened up.”

The most Nixonian and ill-advised thing the governor said was: “I will report back to you in short order.” The state was leaderless. He was missing in action. A new governor was not sworn in.

It was also a lie. “Short order” would have meant by 7 p.m. Monday night. He abandoned ship so that he might wrangle with lawyers.

Surely the other big-ticket johns caught up in this bullshit sting will fare better.