"Giuliani Time" In S.C.

I just finished reading the Peter Boyer profile of Rudy Giuliani in this week’s New Yorker magazine, and I wanted to share some observations (sorry that I don’t have a link, but I run into some technical issues whenever I try to link to the magazine’s online location, newyorker.com – I hope you have better luck than I do) never mind - this may work.

(I think it’s particularly apropos to look at Rudy! in light of his latest gaffe, in which he originally stated that he was at ground zero “as often, if not more, than some of the workers,” when in fact it appears, based on the records in his mayoral archive, that he was only at ground zero for 29 hours as opposed to the 962 hours endured by those working at the site.)

Boyer’s article begins and concludes with Giuliani appearing in South Carolina while running for the Repug presidential nomination and offers choice items such as this…

“But to many in the heartland Giuliani was heroic for what he did in New York before September 11th; his policy prescriptions and, mostly, his taming of the city’s liberal political culture – his famous crackdown on squeegee-men panhandlers, his workfare program, his attack on controversial museum exhibits (“The idea of…so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick!”), and the like.”

Oh yes, Boyer, I’m sure the squeegee-men panhandlers were all registered Democrats (and don't worry, I don't think much of Chris Ofili, Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe either).

As film critic Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times recounts here while reviewing the movie “Giuliani Time”…

What New York's aggressive "We Own the Night" policing policy did do was create fertile ground for several scandals involving overzealous officers. This included pumping 41 bullets into an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo and beating and sodomizing a man in custody, Abner Louima.

The mayor's other controversial programs including forcing people off welfare, which critics said created no real jobs and merely enlarged the underground economy, and a hostility to 1st Amendment rights that led to courts ruling against the Giuliani administration in 22 of 26 cases.

More than this, Giuliani consistently fell out of favor with people who had once been closely allied to him. Former New York (and now Los Angeles) Police Chief William J. Bratton says Giuliani "rules by intimidation and fear," and former city schools chancellor Rudy Crew says, "there's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity. He was barren, completely emotionally barren on the issue of race."

Boyer points out Giuliani’s fallout with Bratton, though they have apparently reconciled somewhat, as well as the Louima incident.

And as Ted Rall notes here…

Giuliani's early "quality of life" initiatives--running off the windshield washers from entrances to bridges and tunnels, cracking down on aggressive subway panhandlers--were popular. But the credit for cleaning up New York really goes to the economic boom of the late '90s. Millions of Wall Street and dot-com dollars poured into city tax collection accounts, reducing poverty and allowing the hiring of more cops and sanitation workers.

By the end of his term the mayor's relationship with New York had turned sour.

"Giuliani was a frustrated and not very popular mayor on September 10, 2001," Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote. "Today, most New Yorkers do see him as a hero, but also as a self-sabotaging, thin-skinned bully. To put it more bluntly, we know he's a bit of a dictator."

To be fair to Boyer, he does portray Giuliani as nepotistic, confused at times to the point of incoherent, and only in typical form when provoked (such as during his response to Ron Paul during the May 15th Republican debate when Paul said, “they attack us because we’re over there…we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years,” which, for me, is an uncommonly intelligent observation for a Republican).

However, Boyer also recites statistics handed to him by Giuliani’s campaign stating that, when Rudy! was mayor, the murder rate dropped by sixty-seven percent, rape by forty-six percent, and robbery by sixty-seven percent; I can’t challenge those numbers at the moment either, but it would have been nice if Boyer had tried. It also would have been nice if Boyer had bothered to provide some context on Giuliani’s statements attacking the U.N. as “irrelevant to any of the major disputes in the world since – gosh, Korea, maybe…”, as well as Boyer’s unsubstantiated claim that Giuliani “had achieved much of his program of radical reform.”

Of course, based on this, it appears that Boyer has more political homework to do anyway.

And in a harbinger of what we would have to look forward to in the event of (God help us) a Rudy! presidency, Rall offers this…

Most disturbing to Americans looking forward to the end of eight years of illegitimate rule by an unelected coup leader, Giuliani tried to exploit 9/11 to remain in power at least three extra months beyond the scheduled end of his term in January 2002. He even threatened to file a lawsuit to overturn the city's term limits law and run for reelection if the Democratic and Republican primary candidates refused to let him stay in power.

They called the wannabe dictator's bluff. So should we.

And here’s more; I hope Boyer reads this Village Voice article at some point, and maybe he could return and ask “America’s Mayor” some more questions, such as why the command and control center for the World Trade Center was put in Building 7 instead of Brooklyn as originally recommended by Port Authority officials and Times journalist Bob Herbert, among others.