No prob, that's what I figured :)
I think you and I agree. Big city mayors are more like corporate CEO’s. They don’t face the same sorts of issues, constitutional issues, as a governor or the President
Not only that but it's simply a fact that for any accomplishment of a leader in these positions, you could engage in a fishing expedition to dig down and find other people involved, a history that its success depended on, etc. To suggest that this diminishes the accomplishment of the leader is spurious and selectively critical. If anything, this is more true of people in higher posts than Mayor. It's especially true of Presidents!
Ronald Reagan is (correctly, in my opinion) given a lot of credit for "winning the Cold War". I think Ronald Reagan had a tremendous amount to do with this, was crucially important, and had Jimmy Carter been re-elected things would have been much different.
That said, the U.S. triumph in the Cold War depended on a lot more than the single, unaided actions of Ronald Reagan. The containment doctrine begun by Truman and carried out under every single President (except perhaps Carter :) had a lot to do with it. The space race had a lot to do with it. Even our "lost cause"/demoralizing wars in Korea and Vietnam had a lot to do with it. One might even say the Beatles had a lot to do with it. There was a historical sequence of events that started well before Reagan came into office that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, Reagan won the Cold War and to deny him this accomplishment because of these things is just wrong. Yes, one could very well write an article headlined "Did Reagan Really Win The Cold War?" and then point out various things that people other than Ronald Reagan did, but this would just be sour grapes, would prove nothing we don't already know, and the only reason to do it would be that someone felt like taking Ronald Reagan down a notch. It's actually a kind of straw man; nobody who says "Reagan won the Cold War" literally means that Reagan all by himself singlehandedly took down the USSR. They mean that as a leader, his leadership actions/decisions played a key role.
That's what's going on with this article & Giuliani, IMHO. Nobody who says "Giuliani cleaned up Times Square" means that he singlehandedly rolled up his sleeves, grabbed a broom, and cleaned it up. They mean simply that as a leader, his leadership actions/decisions played a key role. And nothing in this article actually debunks that. Instead the article focuses on two key points: (1) he didn't do it all by himself and (2) when Times Square got cleaned up, some other place in the city got dirtied up because some of the elements were displaced.
These are silly, straw-man criticisms. Best,