That's an excellent point. I lived under Rudy too, and you said something that rang a bell with me. He was great at fighting crime - but he actually didn't do many things that were new: even Koch had tried the same things, but Koch was not tough enough to get them past the courts and the liberal criminal-chic classes in the press and elsewhere. Rudy was.
But he is a very self-righteous person, and someone like that, convinced that he is in the right on every issue, could be very, very dangerous if he is a supporter of liberal social issues (which Rudy is). He's pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-gun, and I could easily see him using really strong-arm tactics to enforce his opinions in these areas.
Aside from that, getting back to the topic of the thread, I think JR has been more than polite to the Giuliani supporters, who are actually the only ones I have seen doing any flaming. For some reason, they seem to believe that any opposition to Giuliani merits nothing but the harshest response; perhaps he attracts followers with the same absolutist mindset.