CNN Forgot The Other “R”

I didn’t say much on the preposterous fraud of Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani for the Repug presidential nomination yesterday, but only noted that Mike Huckabee voiced his indignation over the snub (which quite likely means the end of his marginal candidacy).

However, in this Paul Krugman blog post, Tom Edsall tells us how Rudy! is modifying his campaign somewhat to pander to Robertson’s crowd even more slavishly than before (and this excerpt tells us how “America’s Mayor” had the “cred” on this issue that right-winger racists are looking for…

Giuliani’s eight years as New York’s chief executive exemplified a Northern adaptation of the GOP’s politically successful “Southern strategy” - the strategy playing on white resistance to and resentment of federal legislation passed in the 1960s mandating desegregation - resistance that produced a realignment in the South and fractured the Democratic loyalties of white working class voters in the urban North from 1968 to 2004.

“Race is at the heart of Rudy’s story,” according to Wayne Barrett, one of Giuliani’s preeminent biographers.

Indeed it is, as noted in this review by Kenneth Turan of the documentary “Giuliani Time” in June 2006…

"He was a one-trick magician, and that was crime," says Ruth Messinger, one of his unsuccessful opponents. Yet for all the talk that he was a mayor who "brought joy, safety and greatness back to New York City," "Giuliani Time" claims the mythology doesn't always stand up to scrutiny.

For one thing, statistics indicate crime in the city began to decline before Giuliani's election. For another, the policemen who made that decline possible were hired when (David) Dinkins was mayor. Finally, there is no consensus that the celebrated "broken windows" school of policing that emphasized dealing with minor infractions such as vandalism really was a factor in suppressing major crime rates.

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."

And as noted here, this is in keeping with Repug party doctrine, preached to all by The Sainted Ronnie R, of course, with the first stop of his 1980 campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

And once Ronnie was elected (here)…

The IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school's regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll. The university filed suit to retain its tax-exempt status, although that suit would not reach the Supreme Court until 1983 (at which time, the Reagan administration argued in favor of Bob Jones University).

So it’s not surprising that racism turns out in the end to be “the tie that binds” between Robertson (who has of course traveled in Repug-friendly circles forever) and Giuliani.

And by the way, Bernie “The Gift That Keeps On Giving” Kerik never seems to go away any more, does he Rudy?

Update: And speaking of Ronnie Baby, in introducing this story via the Daily Kos, SusanG tells us trenchantly that "the cult of individualization, minimal regulation and oversight, and some creative privatization by an employee takes a bite back at the Reagan Library as 80,000 items go missing."