Ready for Rudy’s Comeback?
By Jim Sleeper – June 13, 2011
As GOP presidential hopefuls began preening four years ago, wide excitement about Rudolph Giuliani’s prospects forced me to break a long silence about him. Somebodyhaddasayit: He couldn’t be president, not only because he was too “liberal” on social issues for many Republicans and too “neoconservative” on foreign policy for most people, or because his family life had been messy, or because he was as crass an opportunist as any other contender. Giuliani couldn’t be president for reasons more subtly and profoundly troubling.
Maybe we need to hear those reasons again now that Newt’s meltdown and tonight’s Republican presidential-primary debate will leave some people hungering for Rudy. To understand what’s really wrong here, you need to have watched him at the start of his political career, in 1989 when he ran a losing campaign for mayor of the city, only to come back four years later and win.
Now he’s imagining a presidential comeback analogous to his mayoral comeback of 1993. He thinks that just as conditions worsened in New York City between 1989 and 1993 in ways that disposed more people to his leadership, so conditions have worsened for America in the four years since 2008.
He also imagines that, once he’s been elected president, a future 9/11 will vindicate him as fully as the original did in New York and as the battle of Actium vindicated the crafty Roman general Octavianus, into whose arms a frightened, degraded, desperate Roman republic fell, almost begging him to become its emperor and savior.
Rudy thinks he’s ready, and a President Giuliani would be even scarier than a President Palin. All I’ll do here is make clear what I did four years ago. If and when he does declare his candidacy, it will be time to reprise what we should have learned from his 2008 campaign.
Throughout the 1993 New York mayoral campaign, from my perch at the New York Daily News, and in articles for The New Republic, and on cable and network TV, I probably tried harder than any other columnist I know of to convince left-liberal friends and everyone else that Giuliani would win and that he probably should.
I insisted that it had come to this because racial “Rainbow” and welfare-state politics were imploding, not just in New York and not only thanks to racists, Ronald Reagan, or robber barons. One didn’t need to share all of Giuliani’s “colorblind,” “law-and-order,” and free-market presumptions to want some big shifts in liberal Democratic paradigms and to see that some of those shifts would require a political battering ram, not a scalpel.
I spent a lot of time with Giuliani during the 1993 campaign and his first year in City Hall, and while a dozen of my columns criticized him sharply for presuming far too much, I defended most of his record to the end of his tenure, and still would. He forced New York, that great capital of “root cause” explanations for every social problem, to get real about remedies that work, at least for now, in the world as we know it.
Some of these turned out to be preconditions for progress of any kind: I saw Al Sharpton blink as I told him in a debate that twice as many New Yorkers had been felled by police bullets during David Dinkins’ four-year mayoralty as during Giuliani’s then-seven years and that the drop in all murders meant that at least two thousand black and Hispanic New Yorkers who’d have been dead were up and walking around.
Giuliani’s successes ranged well beyond crime reduction. As late as July, 2001, when his personal and political blunders had eclipsed those gains and he had only a lame duck’s six months to go, I insisted in a New York Observer column that he’d facilitated housing, entrepreneurial, and employment gains for people whose loudest-mouthed advocates called him a racist reactionary. Jim Chapin, the late democratic socialist savant, considered Giuliani a “progressive conservative” like Teddy Roosevelt, who was a New York police commissioner before becoming Vice President and President.
Yet Giuliani’s methods and motives suggest he couldn’t carry his skills and experience to the White House without damaging this country. Two problems run than deeper current “horse race” liabilities such as his social views and family history.
The first serious problem is structural and political: A man who fought the inherent limits of his mayoral office as fanatically as Giuliani would construe presidential prerogatives so broadly he’d make George W. Bush’s discredited notions of unitary executive power seem soft.
Even in the 1980s, as an assistant attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department and U.S. Attorney in New York, Giuliani was imperious and overreaching. He perp-walked Wall Streeters right out of their offices in dramatic prosecutions that failed. He made the troubled daughter of a state judge, Hortense Gabel, testify against her mother and former Miss America Bess Meyerson in a failed prosecution charging, among other things, that Meyerson had hired the judge’s daughter to bribe her into helping “expedite” a messy divorce case. The jury was so put off by Giuliani’s tactics that it acquitted all concerned, as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus recalled ten years later in assessing Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s subpoena of Monica Lewinsky’s mother to testify against her daughter.
At least, as U.S. Attorney, Giuliani served at the pleasure of the President and had to defer to federal judges. Were he the President, U.S. Attorneys would serve at his pleasure — a dangerous arrangement in the wrong hands, we’ve learned — and he’d pick the judges to whom prosecutors defer.
As mayor, Giuliani fielded his closest aides like a fast and sometimes brutal hockey team, micro-managing and bludgeoning city agencies and even agencies that weren’t his, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Board of Education. They deserved it richly enough to make his bravado thrilling to many of us, but it wasn’t very productive. And while this Savonarola disdained even would-be allies in other branches of government, he wasn’t above cutting indefensible deals with crony contractors and pandering shamelessly to some Hispanics, neo-conservative and orthodox Jews, and other favored constituencies.
Even the credit he claimed for transportation, housing and safety improvements belongs partly and sometimes wholly to predecessors’ decisions and to economic good luck: As he left office the New York Times noted that on his first day as mayor in 1994, the Dow Jones had stood at 3754.09, while on his last day, Dec. 31, 2001, it opened at 10,136.99: “For most of his tenure, the city’s treasury gushed with revenues generated by Wall Street.” Dinkins had had to struggle through the after-effects the huge crash of 1987.
Remarkable though Giuliani’s mayoral record remains, it’s complicated by more than these socio-economic circumstances and structural constraints. Ironically, it was his most heroic moments as mayor that spotlighted his deepest presidential liability. Fred Siegel, author of the Giuliani-touting Prince of the City, posed the problem recently when he wondered why, after Giuliani’s 1997 mayoral reelection, with the city buoyed by its new safety and economic success, he wasn’t “able to turn his Churchillian political personality down a few notches.”
I’ll tell you why: Giuliani’s 9/11 performance was sublime for the unnerving reason that he’d been rehearsing for it all his adult life and remained trapped in that stage role. When his oldest friend and deputy mayor Peter Powers told me in 1994 that 16-year-old Rudy had started an opera club at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, I didn’t have to connect too many of the dots I was seeing to notice that Giuliani at times acted like an opera fanatic who’s living in a libretto as much as in the real world.
In private, Giuliani can contemplate the human comedy with a Machiavellian prince’s supple wit. But when he walks on stage, he tenses up so much that even though he can strike credibly modulated, lawyerly poses, his efforts to lighten up seem labored. What really drove many of his actions as mayor was a zealot’s graceless division of everyone into friend or foe and his snarling, sometimes histrionic, vilifications of the foes. Those are operatic emotions, beneath the civic dignity of a great city and its chief magistrate.
I know a few New Yorkers who deserve the Rudy treatment, but only on 9/11 did the whole city become as operatic as the inside of Rudy’s mind. For once, New York re-arranged itself into a stage fit for, say, Rossini’s “Le Siege de Corinth” or some dark, nationalist epic by Verdi or Puccini that ends with bodies strewn all over and the tragic but noble hero grieving for his devastated people and, perhaps, foretelling a new dawn.
It’s unseemly to call New York’s 9/11 agonies “operatic,” but it was Giuliani who called the Metropolitan Opera only a few days after 9/11 and insisted its performances resume. At the start of one of one of them, the orchestra struck up a few familiar chords as the curtain rose on the entire Met cast, stage hands, administrators, secretaries, and custodians — and Rudolph Giuliani, bringing the capacity audience to its feet to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with unprecedented ardor. All gave the mayor “an ovation worthy of Caruso,” as The New Yorker’s Alex Ross put it.
A few days later, Giuliani proposed that his term be extended on an “emergency” basis beyond its lawful end on January 1, 2002. (It wasn’t, and the city did as well as it could have, anyway.)
The columnist Jimmy Breslin once mocked Giuliani as “a small man in search of a balcony,” but I’m not so sure that that will be his epitaph. Should this country suffer another devastating attack, in retaliation for Bin Laden’s killing, before this year’s primaries are over, Giuliani’s prospects for the Republican nomination could soar beyond recall. And a frightened, economically desperate country might give him his balcony.
He is crafty. He’s intrepid, and even a stopped clock is right twice a day: Giuliani was right in some ways for his time, on a mayoral stage with built-in limits. But Augustus knew no limits – and, in ancient Rome at the dawn of a new millennium, he found none. Neither might a President Giuliani in the country America could become if conditions continue to worsen.
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Just You Wait and See….
By Jim Sleeper – June 14, 2011, 12:39PM
All my friends are laughing at me for posting “Ready for Rudy’s Comeback?” not least because the only other bloviator who thinks that Giuiliani will run, and that it matters, is William Kristol.
Now, whenever Kristol makes an electoral prediction, you can bet the ranch on its not coming true. We were reminded of this very well last week by Alex Klein in The New Republic and Adam Clark Estes in The Atlantic, both of them (Sorry, guys!) trolling in the expansive wake of my devastating take-down of this neo-conservative field marshal back when The New York Times’ fickle and perverse publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., gave him an op ed column. Kristol lasted only a year there because it was one of the most hideously clueless columns the Times ever ran.
And now he’s telling us that Rudy is running? And I’m saying so, too?
Wait, wait; I don’t mean it like that! Kristol is writing wishfully, in his customarily serpentine way, because he actually wants Rudy to run. I, in contrast, dread the prospect, but I believe that it will materialize, precisely because conditions in this country are becoming as scary as Rudy is. In other words, it’s a match made in hell, and hell is straight where we’re heading, faster than you can shout “Rudy!”
Predictably — but with the fine exception of today’s strong New York Times editorial exposing the emptiness of the GOP candidates’ debate — the orchestra of high-minded opinion has followed that debate by playing its usual medley, “This Is the Best of All Possible Worlds.” Our professional political musicians expect that the Republican roster will resolve itself somehow into a credible campaign.
But I expect something different: The fatal attraction between a candidate like Rudy and millions of increasingly desperate, angry Americans is coming, as I showed here recently in “American Journalism in the Coils of Ressentiment,” an essay about swift, dark political undercurrents that have been driving conservative attacks on The New York Times. That essay was commended by Columbia Journalism Review managing editor Justin Peters, by Ben Smith at Politico, and by editors of Bookforum, but no one had time to read it, because it’s far too long
So keep laughing, if you must. And I, unlike Kristol, will keep hoping that I’m wrong and that I’ll be able to join you. But I can’t help fearing that we’ll find ourselves tuning up pretty soon to play a medley far grimmer than the one I’m hearing now.