Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani was also a Democrat for McGovern in 1972. The Clintons built a new, post-ideological Democratic Party over the last thirty years. Rudy wants to do a similar rebuilding of a post-ideological Republican Party.
The post-ideological party distinguishes itself from its rivals not through any particular program or deep moral conviction so much as by the character and the charisma of its particular leader—its Sarkozy, or its Berlusconi, or its Clinton—and by its brand-selling strategies.[Snip]By the time David Dinkins became the first African-American mayor of New York, the city had been written off by most people as ungovernable. Mayor Dinkins began the turnaround of the city by adding 6,000 more police to the streets.
Giuliani drew a different lesson than the Clintons in his early political experiences. He watched the winning side in the 1972 election and internalized a strategy that was honed by the likes of George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan over the course of nearly two decades. That strategy can best be described as a sort of "anti-populism," a worldview in which the well-off are continually beset by the poor, the privileged by the disinherited, the white by the black. The remarkable accomplishment of Giuliani was how he was able to use this narrative of disorder to gain power in New York.
He also hired a pair of dynamic new leaders, Ray Kelly as police commissioner and William Bratton as head of New York's transit police. During Dinkins's term the city's murder rate fell by 13.7 percent, robbery fell by 14.6 percent, burglary fell by 17.6 percent, and auto theft fell by 23.8 percent. The city's crime rate dropped in all seven FBI major-felony categories for the first time in nearly four decades.Mayor Dinkins' successes did not suit Rudy. If New York was not "ungovernable," why would the voters elect Rudy to clean up the city? So Rudy ran an under-the-table race-based campaign designed to appeal to racists without losing the Liberal vote.
Similarly, the notorious porn shops and movie houses along 42nd Street that Giuliani would later claim to have closed himself had in fact already been shuttered as the city began the transformation of Times Square into a Disney fantasia. Indeed, the last graffiti-covered subway car had been taken off the line in 1989, under Mayor Ed Koch. Even the "squeegee men"—homeless individuals who wiped the windshields of cars against the owners' wishes and then hassled them for payment, and whom Giuliani would make the emblem of New York's perpetual disorder—had been removed from the streets by the time Giuliani took the oath of office on January 1, 1994.
Thus nearly every major accomplishment that Giuliani points to today either had already been achieved or was well on the way to being achieved by the time he became mayor.
Giuliani countered the encouraging statistics with a ruthless campaign designed to reaffirm New Yorkers' worst fears about their city, what The New York Times Magazine would call "the race race." In part this effort was viciously, relentlessly personal, designed to challenge Dinkins's very legitimacy as mayor. Often the dirty work was done by surrogates, such as Giuliani crony Jackie Mason, the comedian, who publicly dismissed Dinkins as nothing but "a fancy shvartzer with a mustache." The same Times article noted a more harrowing incident in the fall of 1992, in which Giuliani gave a profanity-laced speech that inflamed a mob of some 10,000 "raucous, beer-drinking, overwhelmingly white police officers" who had just finished a march on City Hall to protest a Dinkins-backed proposal for civilian oversight of police-misconduct complaints. Many in the mob spewed racial epithets and carried signs condemning Dinkins in grossly racial terms, including one that read, "Dump the washroom attendant!" Giuliani's complicity in this disgraceful incident was dutifully condemned by the media ...which nonetheless validated the same stereotypes. Hence Janice C. Simpson's noting in Time magazine that "Dinkins comes off as a courtly but unimaginative bureaucrat with a taste for fussy clothes and fancy ceremonies." What right did this black man have to nice clothes, civic ceremonies, or facial adornment—or to be mayor at all?So what about the improvement of crime statistics during Rudy's time as Mayor. Does he deserve any credit?
Seeking to elide the steadily dropping crime statistics, Giuliani resorted to more racial code, charging in a speech that Dinkins "might as well have held a ceremony in which he turned the neighborhoods over to the drug dealers. As far as I'm concerned, there is no future in surrender." The very slogan of his 1993 campaign, "One Standard, One City," implied that somehow black New Yorkers were getting away with something under a black mayor. Sure, crime might be falling, but what really mattered to New Yorkers was something called "quality of life"—a nebulous state of grace that was thwarted by all signs of disorder on the streets, from open drug dealing to aggressive panhandling to uncollected trash, and of course those darn squeegee men.
"Quality of life" provided Giuliani a more nuanced appeal to a group who were rapidly becoming the racially divided city's most sought-after swing voters. These were white liberals, more generally caricatured in New York as "Upper West Side liberals." Open race-baiting secured Giuliani's base only in what might be called the "red states" of New York, the outer boroughs of Staten Island, Queens, and parts of Brooklyn, where he had already captured large majorities among white ethnics during his previous run for mayor. Yet race-baiting remained repellent to the relatively affluent, white social liberals who inhabited much of Manhattan and the trendier sections of Brooklyn. Even though many of these voters had become more conservative over the years—or had been replaced by younger, more conservative voters—they still would not countenance an openly racist appeal.[Snip]
In his second run for mayor, Giuliani's "quality of life" appeal brilliantly bundled together any number of the quotidian irritations of living in a large and turbulent metropolis. And with the use of select code words—such as the "surrender" of the streets or "One Standard, One City"—Giuliani was able to subtly link these frustrations to a racial root cause. In this, Giuliani was aided by Dinkins's maladroit handling of a number of searing racial incidents, including the boycott of a Korean-American grocery in Brooklyn, an anti-Semitic race riot in Crown Heights, and the ongoing hate-mongering of black racial extremists such as Alton Maddox, Vernon Mason, and Sonny Carson. Giuliani used such incidents to create a sort of siege mentality, in which whites, already harassed at every turn by squeegee men, trash storms, and peddlers, were on the verge of losing control of the city entirely—maybe were even at the precipice of some sort of apocalyptic racial massacre.
It is true that crime continued to drop precipitously during Giuliani's mayoral reign—as it did all around the country, for many reasons. Giuliani credited the decline mostly to a "CompStat," computer-driven system brought in by his new police commissioner, William Bratton—originally a Dinkins hire—then forced Bratton out when he began to steal some of Giuliani's own spotlight. Meanwhile, police response time actually increased by 24 percent in his first term, and the percentage of felony arrests leading to an indictment dropped by almost one third.So we know that Rudy is a hot-tempered man with strong authoritarian tendencies who surrounds himself with yes-men, ignores contradictory advice and has poor judgment in who he appoints as subordinates (Kerek and Harding.) What we have to add to that is that he won his only elected political office, Mayor of New York, by running a blatantly racist and dishonest campaign, then coasted through his terms of office based on the successful efforts of Mayor Dinkins to clean up the so-called "Ungovernable" city of New York.
The city's public schools, a perennial source of despair, continued to decay, while Giuliani forced out three different chancellors over various trivial disagreements. He removed 600,000 New Yorkers from the welfare rolls, with methods that the courts repeatedly struck down as illegal and arbitrary. What happened to most of these people, how they managed to live and where, is simply not recorded—just as it is not recorded what happened to the more than 8 million people who were thrown off the rolls by Bill Clinton's national "welfare reform."
What Giuliani relied upon to rule were regular authoritarian gestures. He screamed at reporters during press conferences and ranted at callers to his radio show; tried to cut off city funding for a nonprofit AIDS hospice that had dared to criticize him; attempted to censor controversial art; and exuberantly picked fights with unpopular out-of-towners, such as Yassir Arafat, or the entire state of Virginia, which had balked at accepting New York's garbage.
Race never went away either. Without quite saying so, Giuliani made it clear that white people would no longer be on the defensive in his city. His administration was punctuated by a series of ugly incidents, including the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man mistaken for a rapist by four plainclothes police detectives who fired forty-one unanswered bullets at him; the fatal shooting of a club security guard, Patrick Dorismond, after he was approached at random by undercover narcotics officers who insisted that he sell them crack; and the brutal rape of a suspect, Abner Louima, by police officers armed with a broken broom handle.
Any protests over such actions were usually greeted with indifference or renewed shows of force on the part of the mayor. Giuliani confronted mourners of the world's AIDS victims with police snipers on the roof of City Hall, intimidated demonstrators by ensuring that they spent as much time as possible being put "through the system," and summoned an unnerving array of heavily armed police, complete with hovering helicopters, to virtually "lock down" part of Harlem when a noxious black nationalist dared to hold a rally there. In the case of Dorismond, the murdered guard, Giuliani went so far as to illegally open and leak the contents of his juvenile police file to the public.
That sets up a scoreboard for Rudy as no wins, all losses, and really poor character. He is not a man who should ever even be allowed near the White House, let alone elected to enter it as President.
[See also my earlier post What is Giulianni running on? Racism disguised as killing Arabs.. ]
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