Posted on 03/06/2007 7:06:19 AM PST by Peach
The other night I was having dinner with two friends in an Upper West Side restaurant when an extraordinarily loud group of about a dozen people settled into the next table.
THE LONG KNIVES HAVE BEEN out for Giuliani ever since he started proving liberals wrong in the 1990s, and it's only going to get worse. "Him?" was the one-word headline on the cover story in New York last week, followed by, "New Yorkers may be surprised by how far Rudy Giuliani has come already. But that's only because we know him."
As a footnote, it should be pointed out that Giuliani won a landslide re-election in 1997 in a city that is less than 20 percent Republican. Polls are already showing Rudy running even with fellow New Yorker Hillary Clinton and winning New Jersey, a more representative Democratic state. When New York refers to "New Yorkers," it is only describing a very isolated, self-satisfied slice of the population.
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11102
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Ping
Just before Giuliani was elected in 1993, Time ran a cover story on "The Rotting Apple." Three years later, Giuliani was on the cover as "The Man Who Saved New York." (It was only five years later he became "Man of the Year" in 2001.) Read Fred Siegel's Prince of the City and you will find 90 percent of Giuliani's accomplishments came before September 11th. He cut murders from 2,100 a year to less than 800. He drove the mafia out of the Fulton Fish Market -- even though a few city officials almost got killed in the process. He cut taxes in a city that had never seen a tax cut. He cut spending (ditto). He faced off against every municipal union in the city -- including the police, who rioted against him. He pulled New York's economy so far out of the depths that for the first time since the 1950s the city grew faster than the rest of the country. (Under David Dinkins and Mario Cuomo, New York had lost one out of every five jobs during the 1991 recession.)
Doesn't anyone understand what is happening here? These people are all supporters of Rudy Giuliani BECAUSE THEY KNOW HE'S A LIBERAL.
Trust me on this one . . . a candidate who can win in New York City and in New Jersey these days would be terrible for this country.
good article- thanks for posting
Plus, the New York MSM knows him. Moreover, in order for the elites to maintain gridlock the President must be Republican, as liebrals are too smart to fall for any demoncrats in name onlyies [DINOs].
You're actually wrong here. I think it's more like 99% of his accomplishments came before 9/11. What's worth noting here is that -- with this point in mind -- if Rudy Giuliani had run for re-election in 2001 and the election had been held on September 10th, he probably would have lost by a pretty wide margin.
I think a lot of it has to do with the notion that at least 90% of his accomplishments came before he ran for re-election in 1997.
I agree with you on that one -- but the fringes of both Parties don't elect the president. I would put my conservative "credentials" up against anyone here -- and yet I'd be the first to acknowledge that a "pure" conservative candidate is unlikely to win a presidential election. The problem with Giuliani is that this "purity" argument is complete nonsense. He's actually closer to a "pure liberal" than a "pure conservative."
Your claim that New Yorkers like Rudy because he is a liberal is pure horse pucky. He was hated and reviled as Mayor and every success he had was discounted amid claims of civil rights infractions and any other excuse they could manufacture.
Actually, your claim that New Yorkers hated and reviled him as mayor is pure horse pucky. The author correctly points out that he was re-elected in a landslide in 1997, so clearly "New Yorkers" didn't hate and revile him at all.
I find it pretty astonishing that even here on FreeRepublic we have some folks who consider the opinions of a bunch of elitist @ssholes at a restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side to be representative of New York City as a whole.
In addition, By September of 2001 many of Giuliani's earlier supporters had simply grown tired of his totalitarian approach to governing the city.
"A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country." (Matt. X 3:57)
And that individual does not exist in real politics, so what happens is that the fringes will throw support
Of course, it's from the gun-grabbing, baby-killing, cross-dressing, treasonous-liberal American Spectator. /s
The Churchill analogy is apt.
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