Ready for Rudy
By Deroy Murdock
Published 9/26/2006 (EXCERPT)
….Is leadership enough? Do Giuliani's policies help or hinder his political future? Could he become the Great Right Hope in 2008? To paraphrase Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York": If he can make it there, can he make it anywhere?
TO GAUGE GIULIANI'S SUCCESS as mayor, and assess the skills he might muster as president, stroll for a moment through the junkyard he inherited when he entered City Hall on January 1, 1994.
Historian Fred Siegel's indispensable analysis of Giuliani's mayoralty, The Prince of the City, describes the holistic dysfunction that greeted Giuliani.
* New York City's jobless rate was 10.2 percent. The previous four years, Gotham lost 235 jobs-every day. Financial guru Felix Rohatyn complained, "virtually all human activities are taxed to the hilt."
* In 1993, 1,946 New Yorkers were murdered, down from a peak of 2,262 in 1990, but still a spectacular level of carnage. Social pathologies fueled disorder and lawlessness. Vagrants relieved themselves on trash-strewn sidewalks. Mental patients roamed the streets, and occasionally pushed commuters onto subway tracks. Some 1.32 million New Yorkers, one of six, were on welfare.
* In August 1991, an anti-Semitic pogrom erupted in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Street battles raged for days as Democratic Mayor David Dinkins failed to deploy cops. A young hoodlum named Lemrick Nelson fatally stabbed Australian rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum as a black mob yelled, "Get the Jew…."
Today, New York City thrives. Unemployment one month after 9/11 stood at 6.3 percent. Homicides had plummeted 65 percent, mainly in once-crime-infested black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Asked once what he had done for minorities, Giuliani responded: "They are alive, how about we start with that?"…
The city is visibly cleaner and more robust. Amazingly enough, Reader's Digest in June dubbed once-abrasive New York the world's politest city, a notch above placid, fastidious Zurich.
Gotham's path from chaos to courtesy closely parallels Giuliani's journey from freshly minted mayor to globally lauded leader. How did he do it?...
Giuliani, who considers himself a Reaganite, did so largely by applying conservative principles of tax reduction, fiscal responsibility, privatization, law and order, and colorblindness. He sounded Reaganesque as mayor-elect when he said to balance the city budget, "we have to increase the number of private-sector jobs." Central to this was "to reduce the size and cost of city government…."
On issue after issue, conservatives should hope what is past will be prologue.
Taxes
"The thing that probably disturbs me the most when I read the New York Times editorials, they've kind of turned around the whole idea of cutting taxes, and they make tax increases morally courageous," Giuliani said April 25. "I have no idea what is courageous about raising taxes. I understand it's courageous to run into a fire and take somebody out, but I can't figure out what's courageous about raising taxes. I don't understand why you would think that in an economy that's essentially a private economy, it makes more sense and is more efficient for the government to confiscate more of that money."
Giuliani was speaking that day to the Manhattan Institute, an influential think tank well regarded by conservatives and libertarians alike. Giuliani credits the organization and its quarterly magazine, City Journal, with inspiring many of his reforms.
Giuliani's tax record matches his rhetoric. He cut or eliminated 23 levies totaling $8 billion. He slashed municipal tax revenues' share of personal income by 18.9 percent and the top local income-tax rate by 21 percent. Spending
Giuliani's expenditure growth averaged 2.9 percent annually, while local inflation between January 1994 and December 2001 averaged 3.6 percent. His fiscal 1995 budget decreased outlays by 1.6 percent, while his post-9/11 fiscal 2002 plan lowered appropriations by 2.6 percent….
Bureaucracy
While hiring 12 percent more cops and 12.8 percent more teachers, Giuliani sliced municipal manpower elsewhere by 17.2 percent, from 117,494 workers in 1993 to 97,338 in 2001….
Public Assistance
Two years before President Clinton signed federal welfare reform, Giuliani started reducing Gotham's dole from 1,112,490 recipients in 1993 to 462,595 in 2001, a 58.4-percent cut, to 1966 levels….
Giuliani also renamed welfare offices "Job Centers." According to Giuliani's book, Leadership, City Hall placed 151,376 welfare beneficiaries in private jobs in fiscal 2001, a 16-fold increase over 1993's 9,215 assignments under Dinkins.
Family Affairs
Minors in foster care fell from 47,509 in December 1993 to 28,700 in 2001. While only 2,312 children were adopted in Gotham in 1994, cumulative adoptions swelled to 27,949 between then and 2001. This effort was led by Nicholas Scoppetta-a one-time Justice Department colleague of Giuliani's and current FDNY commissioner-himself a former foster child.
Giuliani also spoke in very traditional terms about parental responsibility. "Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without a father," Giuliani said in his January 14, 1999 State of the City speech. "So, I guess if you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, a lot better than the City of New York, the United States Congress, the Social Welfare Agency, and Administration for Children Services, I guess the social program would be called fatherhood…"
Privatization
Giuliani shrank the 33,000-unit portfolio of city-owned apartments by 69.8 percent. Families and individual residents now occupy those private homes. He sold WNYC-AM, WNYC-FM, WNYC-TV, and Gotham's equity in the U.N. Plaza Hotel. He let the private Central Park Conservancy manage all 843 acres of Manhattan's beloved urban forest.
"One Standard. One City."
Giuliani ran on this slogan in 1993, then immediately implemented it. During his first month as mayor, Giuliani scrapped the city's 20 percent set-asides for minority- and female-owned contractors, and a 10 percent price premium that such companies could charge above the bids of white, male competitors.
As Giuliani explained at a December 3, 1997 Manhattan Institute forum:
“I, number one, thought that was very bad public policy. The city shouldn't be paying 10 percent more. Remember, I was dealing with a city that had about a $3 billion deficit at the time. How we could possibly pay 10 percent more for anything seemed incomprehensible to me.
“And second... the whole idea of quotas to me perpetuates discrimination. It has exactly the opposite effect on people who support quotas think it would have. So, I did away with it.
Crime and Quality of Life
Anyone who thinks Giuliani is a liberal should walk through Times Square. A dozen years ago, it was a gritty, dangerous place, brimming with litter, vagrants, and pornography shops. It now teems with tourists, restaurants, concert venues, broadcast studios for ABC and MTV, and the NASDAQ market site. At the Minskoff Theater, Disney's The Lion King thrills moms, dads, and kids. Next door, at the Amsterdam Theater, Mary Poppins opens this fall….
Education
Giuliani pulls no punches on schools, either. As he said in the June 16, 1994 Newsday: "If you give the Board of Education more money, you end up with something like the old Soviet Union."
…Giuliani scrapped tenure for principals and dumped social promotion, which matriculated pupils even when they could not perform grade-level work. He also launched a Charter School Fund and openly advocated vouchers, traveling to Milwaukee in May 2001 to embrace its school-choice successes. Giuliani worked, as well, with John Cardinal O'Connor and Rabbi Morris Sherer in 1996 to make available to underachieving public-school students as many as 2,000 privately funded seats in Catholic and Jewish parochial schools…
"The one area that I would emphasize... is choice and vouchers," Giuliani said, warmly embracing the "V" word. "The only thing that I believe is going to change dramatically public education in this country is to go to a choice system and break up the monopoly."
Immigration and Terrorism
Giuliani sees immigration and terrorism in tandem. "In an era of a War on Terrorism," he said April 25, "how do we create more security?" He argues against what he calls the House of Representatives' "punitive approach." Giuliani worries law-enforcement officers will be so busy handling "a system that's already unenforceable" that they won't "focus on the people that we have to focus on who... might come here to carry out terrorist acts or to sell drugs or to commit crimes." He wants tighter U.S. borders and high-tech identification for immigrants.
Giuliani favors the U.S. Senate's proposal. "Give people a way to earn citizenship in which they have to demonstrate facility with English, and they have jobs, and they're paying taxes, and they've put themselves in an entirely legal status... It'll be much harder for terrorists to hide in a situation like that…"
While prominent Republicans can give more conservative speeches than Giuliani, one would have to reach back to Ronald Reagan for a leader who has implemented more policies dear to the right.
"He is America's most successful conservative currently in office," columnist George Will wrote in October 1998. "He understands that culture, more than politics, determines a community's success, and he has devised policies to drive cultural change in a conservative direction…"