Posted on 03/10/2007 9:24:06 PM PST by Angel
The deluge of commentary on Rudolph Giuliani’s presidential prospects has forced me finally to break my long silence about the man. Somebody’s gotta say it: He shouldn’t be president, not because he’s too “liberal” or “conservative,” or because his positions on social issues have been heterodox, or because he seems tone-deaf on race, or because his family life has been messy, or because he’s sometimes been as crass an opportunist as almost every other politician of note. Rudy Giuliani shouldn’t be president for reasons more profoundly troubling. Maybe you had to be with him at the start of his electoral career to see them clearly.
Throughout the fall, 1993 New York mayoral campaigns, I tried harder than any other columnist I know of to convince left-liberal friends and everyone else that Giuliani would win and probably should.
In the Daily News, the New Republic, and on cable and network TV, I insisted it had come to this because racial “Rainbow” and welfare-state politics were imploding nationwide, not just in New York and not only thanks to racists, Ronald Reagan, or robber barons. One didn’t have to share all of Giuliani’s “colorblind,” “law-and-order,” and free-market presumptions to want big shifts in liberal Democratic paradigms and to see that some of those shifts would require a political battering ram, not a scalpel.
I spent a lot of time with Giuliani during the 1993 campaign and his first year in City Hall, and while a dozen of my columns criticized him sharply for presuming far too much, I defended most of his record to the end of his tenure. He forced New York, that great capital of “root cause” explanations for every social problem, to get real about remedies that work, at least for now, in the world as we know it. I saw Al Sharpton blink as I told him in a debate that twice as many New Yorkers had been felled by police bullets during David Dinkins’ four-year mayoralty as during Giuliani’s then-seven years and that the drop in all murders meant that at least two thousand black and Hispanic New Yorkers who’d have been dead were up and walking around.
Giuliani’s successes ranged well beyond crime reduction. As late as July, 2001, when his personal and political blunders had eclipsed those gains and he had only a lame duck’s six months to go, I insisted in a New York Observer column that he’d facilitated housing, entrepreneurial, and employment gains for people whose loudest-mouthed advocates called him a racist reactionary. James Chapin, the late democratic socialist savant, considered Giuliani a “progressive conservative” like Teddy Roosevelt, who was a New York police commissioner before becoming Vice President and President.
Yet Giuliani’s methods and motives suggest he couldn’t carry his skills and experience to the White House without damaging this country. Two problems run deeper than the current likely “horse race” liabilities, such as his social views and family history.
The first serious problem is structural and political: A man who fought the inherent limits of his mayoral office as fanatically as Giuliani would construe presidential prerogatives so broadly he’d make George Bush’s notions of “unitary” executive power seem soft.
Even in the 1980s, as an assistant attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department and U.S. Attorney in New York, Giuliani was imperious and overreaching. He "perp-walked" Wall Streeters right out of their offices in dramatic prosecutions that failed. He made the troubled daughter of a state judge, Hortense Gabel, testify against her mother and former Miss America Bess Meyerson in a failed prosecution charging, among other things, that Meyerson had hired the judge’s daughter to bribe her into helping “expedite” a messy divorce case. The jury was so put off by Giuliani’s tactics that it acquitted all concerned, as the Washington Post recalled ten years later in assessing Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s subpoena of Monica Lewinsky’s mother to testify against her daughter.
At least, as U.S. Attorney, Giuliani served at the pleasure of the President and had to defer to federal judges. Were he the President, U.S. Attorneys would serve at his pleasure -- a dangerous arrangement in the wrong hands, we’ve learned -- and he’d pick the judges to whom prosecutors defer.
As mayor, Giuliani fielded his closest aides like a fast and sometimes brutal hockey team, micro-managing and bludgeoning city agencies and even agencies that weren’t his, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Board of Education. They deserved it richly enough to make his bravado thrilling to many of us, but it wasn’t very productive. And while this Savonarola disdained even would-be allies in other branches of government, he wasn’t above cutting indefensible deals with crony contractors and pandering shamelessly to some Hispanics, orthodox Jews, and other favored constituencies.
Even the credit he claimed for transportation, housing and safety improvements belongs partly and sometimes wholly to predecessors’ decisions and to economic good luck: As he left office the New York Times noted that on his first day as mayor in 1994, the Dow Jones had stood at 3754.09, while on his last day, Dec. 31, 2001, it opened at 10,136.99: “For most of his tenure, the city’s treasury gushed with revenues generated by Wall Street.” Dinkins had had to struggle through the after-effects the huge crash of 1987.
Remarkable though Giuliani’s mayoral record remains, it’s complicated further by more than socio-economic circumstances and structural constraints. Ironically, it was his most heroic moments as mayor that spotlighted his deepest presidential liability. Fred Siegel, author of the Giuliani-touting Prince of the City, posed the problem recently when he wondered why, after Giuliani’s 1997 mayoral reelection, with the city buoyed by its new safety and economic success, he wasn’t “able to turn his Churchillian political personality down a few notches."
I’ll tell you why: Giuliani’s 9/11 performance was sublime for the unnerving reason that he’d been rehearsing for it all his adult life and remained trapped in that stage role. When his oldest friend and deputy mayor Peter Powers told me in 1994 that 16-year-old Rudy had started an opera club at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, I didn’t have to connect too many of the dots I’d been seeing to begin noticing that Giuliani at times acted like an opera fanatic who’s living in a libretto as much as in the real world.
In private, Rudy can contemplate the human comedy with a Machiavellian prince’s supple wit. But when he walks on stage, he tenses up so much that even his efforts to lighten up seem labored. What drove him as mayor was a zealot’s graceless division of everyone into friend or foe and his snarling, sometimes histrionic, vilifications of the foes. Those are operatic emotions, beneath the civic dignity of a great city and its chief magistrate.
Of course, I know more than a few New Yorkers who deserve the Rudy treatment, but only on 9/11 did the city really become as operatic as the inside of Rudy’s mind. For once, New York re-arranged itself into a stage fit for, say, Rossini’s “Le Siege de Corinth” or some dark, nationalist epic by Verdi or Puccini that ends with bodies strewn all over and the tragic but noble hero grieving for his devastated people and, perhaps, foretelling a new dawn.
Giuliani called the Metropolitan Opera only a few days after 9/11 and insisted its performances resume. At the first of these, the orchestra, striking up a few well-known chords, brought the entire cast, Met administrative, secretarial, and custodial staff (who'd come up onstage), and the capacity audience to their feet to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with unprecedented passion. A few days later Giuliani proposed that his term be extended on an “emergency” basis beyond its lawful end on January 1, 2002. (It wasn’t, and the city did as well as it could have, anyway.)
Should this country suffer another devastating attack before the 2008 primaries are over, Giuliani’s presidential prospects may soar beyond recalling. But the very Constitutional notion of recall could soar away with them. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Giuliani was right for his time and on a stage with built-in limits. But we shouldn’t have to make him the next President to learn why even a grateful Britain dumped Churchill in its first major election after V-E day.
It's not Texas or California, either.
No one state is proper prep-work for leading the whole nation.
The ankle biters are out, blame others, but don't come up with a powerhouse candidate themselves.
WHAAAAA!
The Rudyhaters are too busy clogging up these threads telling everyone what the Rufyfans WILL say, and acting like the widdle wounded victims, to actually read and think about and discuss the situation.
The situation being that we should push as hard as possible for a conservative to win the nomination, BUT whoever wins we have to get behind him to defeat the Democrat.
I'll leave the floor to the whiney Rudyhaters so they can now tell you all what I'm REALLY saying, i.e. they'll conveniently skip how I said we need a conservative to win the nomination.
What garbage. Do you really believe the outcome is the same if you have Hillary or Giuliani as President? The 2008 election is not going to be won on social issues.
I agree. It must be a copy of a column he wrote for Slate or some other periodical. He must've had a deadline he couldn't think of something to write about in time for, so he just winged it. Badly.
RON PAUL FOR PRESIDENT!!!
John Bolton as his Vice Running Mate.
You can't think for yourself?
LOL! Humor! That was humor!!
You seem to agree with the Left. They say Giuliani is a budding fascist. If you read Leftist blogs, they say similar things to "respect for our constituional rights would never be recovered." The Leftists say that if he's elected he will become a dictator. I remember them saying the same things about Ronald Reagan. They were wrong about him and they're wrong about Giuliani. I lived for 8 years with Giuliani as my Mayor. Never did I see him as a fascist. The DemonRats and Radical Leftists did. His initiatives helped to clean up this city. People felt safe to visit and do business here. Times Square was transformed from a dangerous human cesspool into a clean, safe and vital area. I never feared him and I have no reason to fear him now. I don't support Giuliani for President. I don't agree with his views on abortion, guns and many other things. At the present time, I support no one. I'm certain of one thing. He is no fascist.
I have the same sense that he doesn't have a center.
A man's got to know his limitations and he doesn't have the experience to know his.
A "practical" Bill Clinton: parochial, short-sighted and small.
Oh good. I was worried ~LOL~
I must have a weird sense of humor because it sure doesn't click with alot of folks!
I think a lot of us don't come across in writing the way we really mean to sound. That is the hardest thing about communicating via the internet.
Rudy's a hardcore leftist. Opposing his run for the nomination as hard as possible is what someone who actually wants a conservative to win the nomination would do.
After watching the bureaucrats in the permanent govt. in action during the war on terror, I find myself wanting a President who will start firing these people left and right.
I don't oppose ANYONE's run for the nomination--it's a free country. Doesn't mean I have to vote for them, but the nomination process should be free and open. THAT is the conservative position--it's the libs who want to control, the conservatives who want people to have freedom to live with as little regulation as possible--remember?
Hello Hillary!
Jim Sleeper writing from a liberal slant? You're joking right? Jim is one of the most best known conservative writers out there. His book "Liberal Racism" is a conservative classic. All politics aside it would not hurt you to become acquainted with his work.
I know what you mean! I do a whole lot better face to face.
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