# Posted 4:45 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

MoDo SAYS:

How could [Giuliani] pass up the chance to mock his old nemesis Hillary, the feminist icon who is totally dependent on her husband to do the heavy lifting?

The rest of the column is a snide attack on Giuliani, but give Dowd credit for this bit of bipartisanship. I hope Dowd stays at the Times for another 30 years, because every time someone accuses "bloggers" of being petty and mean-spirited, the correct response is obvious.

Labels: 2008, Hillary, Rudy Giuliani

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# Posted 5:13 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

NUANCED GIULIANI-BASHING: As McCain supporter, I might be expected to take every shot I can at Rudolph Giuliani. Last week, a Washington Post/ABC poll showed McCain running second to Giuliani, closer than both Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney. As a loyal supporter, shouldn't I do my utmost to knock Giuliani off the perch that once belonged to McCain?

Maybe if the criticism were more persuasive, but John Judis of The New Republic has really done a third-rate job of trying to brand Giuliani as an extremist while praising him just enough to be fair enough for the pages of TNR. In his profile, Judis accuses Giuliani of nothing less than “a reluctance to cede power and a contempt for the democratic process.”

Judis makes it sound like Giuliani is some sort of Putin. Judis basically argues that Giuliani's first term as mayor was a success, but then his inner demons prevailed. After being re-elected:

Giuliani decided that he needed to suppress not only petty criminals, but also jaywalkers, street vendors, speeding bicycle messengers, and reckless taxi drivers. "If we don't act in a civil manner here, we can't thrive as individuals or as the capital of the world," Giuliani announced in February 1998. Giuliani's new campaign, billed "Creating a More Civil City," was met with strikes from cab drivers and food vendors, as well as angry reactions from citizens threatened with arrest for jaywalking. Giuliani finally gave up on it, but, the next year, he took on the New York art scene. He tried to stop the Brooklyn Museum from putting on a provocative show, "Sensation," which he called "sick stuff." Giuliani's attempt to cut off city funding for the museum and fire its trustees was defeated in court...

Andrew Kirtzman attributes Giuliani's threats against the Brooklyn Museum to a desire to curry favor with upstate New Yorkers whose votes he would have needed to win the 2000 Senate election against Hillary Clinton. And, indeed, Giuliani currently brags about his bid to shut down the exhibit when trying to woo social conservatives. But this move, like his poorly executed expansion of the Street Crime Unit and his crusade against street vendors and jaywalkers, was consistent with Giuliani's growing commitment to use his authority at the expense of liberty.

It reminds me of that famous poem by Martin Niemoller about the Third Reich. First they came for the street vendors, and nobody protested. Then they came for the jaywalkers and nobody protested. Then they came for the Art Museum and nobody protested. Finally, they came for me and there was nobody left to protest.

I tend to agree that Giuliani’s threats against the Brooklyn Museum were a political stunt. That’s not my kind of politics. But rather than any sort of contempt for the democratic process, it shows that Giuliani will engage in the sort of pandering that is part of our proud democratic tradition.

But worse was yet to come:

Perhaps the most telling example of Giuliani's attempt to expand his authority came after September 11. In the crisis created by the terrorist attacks, Giuliani excelled as a leader. He was calm and eloquent, a voice of reassurance while the president, aloft in Air Force One, remained curiously silent. But, even before the dust had settled over Ground Zero, Giuliani began lobbying the New York legislature to repeal the city's two-term limit so he could run again, while simultaneously pressuring the candidates vying for his office to accept a 90-day extension of his term. Giuliani's moves showed a reluctance to cede power and a contempt for the democratic process. It was a demonstration of how far he would go in the pursuit of authority.

Lobbying. Pressuing. Forgive me for sounding a bit cynical, but does that represent contempt for the democratic process, or what democratic politics usually consists of?

Coming from Judis and TNR, this kind of exaggeration makes me think that Democrats don’t have too much ammunition when it comes to Giuliani’s record. And if Giuliani were nominated, his campaign could proudly observe that even excessive critics like Judis credit him with:

The broken windows theory [of law enforcement] fit Giuliani's view of liberty and authority. It meant that, in order to create order and encourage moral liberty, citizens would have to allow the police to discourage behavior that was often only marginally illegal.

Giuliani hired Bratton, Boston's police chief, to put the strategy into practice -- and, supplemented by the innovative use of computers to single out and target high-crime neighborhoods, it had a dramatic effect on New York's crime rate. Giuliani's detractors would later say that the decline began under Dinkins, but that is misleading. The city's murder rate reached an all-time high in 1990, then declined slightly over the next two years. But it was only after Giuliani took office that the crime rate declined precipitously -- starting in 1994, when it fell by 12 percent. New York's reduction in crime also far exceeded the national average -- 16 percent in the first half of 1995 compared to one percent nationally.

Giuliani enjoyed similar success in driving the Mafia out of both the Fulton Fish Market and the commercial garbage business. He also reduced fraud in New York's welfare rolls -- no small accomplishment. From 1989 to 1995, more than 270,000 New Yorkers were added to the welfare rolls. After Giuliani instituted fingerprint checks and home visits in 1995 -- an infringement on liberty to be sure -- the welfare rolls declined by 18 percent the first year.

Giuliani easily won reelection in 1997 and enjoyed widespread popularity -- even in parts of the black community. Black leaders like the Reverend Floyd Flake appreciated that Giuliani's policing methods -- however intrusive -- had revived neighborhoods that had been riven by drugs and guns. As journalist Andrew Kirtzman put it in his book on the Giuliani years, "The essential truth of '97 -- that life on the streets was calmer, safer, saner -- was just as relevant to the poor of Bed-Sty as to the prosperous of Brooklyn Heights.”

I grew up in New York City. I lived there until 1995 and visited often until 1999. What happened in New York seemed like a miracle. A city condemned to persistent failure and decline suddenly discovered its former glory. It really felt like the greatest city in the world.

Labels: 2008, Rudy Giuliani

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# Posted 11:56 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

TWO NEW YORKERS' THOUGHTS ABOUT BLOOMBERG: The political striptease continues. Bloomberg has left the GOP. And why shouldn't the tease continue well into the spring of 2008? There are no primaries for independent candidates. And this one doesn't have to worry about fund-raising. If I were hizzoner, I'd just wait to see what happens in the early primaries, then see if either major candidate (or both) were vulnerable.

My question is what ideas would actually make Bloomberg different than either major party candidate. According to my girlfriend, who lived in the city for eight years until this past April, Bloomberg simply "exudes competence". I grew up in the city but haven't spent much time there since 1999. No question the city has done extraordinarily well under Bloomberg. But Mayor Mike is sort of the HW Bush to Giuliani's Reagan. He's the kinder, gentler successor to the Real Thing. If Giuliani won the GOP nomination, would it seem non-sensical for his successor to make an independent bid for President? Or is kinder, gentler and competent just what voters are looking for?

UPDATE: I just surfed over to Dan Drezner's blog and it seems that Bloomberg has piqued his interest as well.

Labels: 2008, Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani

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# Posted 9:59 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE CASE AGAINST GIULIANI: Just because I'm pro-McCain doesn't mean I'm anti-Giuliani. But OxFriend Jim Sleeper covered Giuliani very closely during Rudy's time as mayor and is very much anti-Giuliani. Jim writes over at TPM Cafe that:

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 deeper than the current likely “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 Bush’s notions of “unitary” executive power seem soft.

That analogy strikes me as a bit off base. Rough-and-tumble municipal politics isn't the same thing as compromising civil rights in the name of national security. And given how uncompromising this administration has been on such issues, I find it hard to imagine that Rudy could take a much harder line.

If Jim wanted to persuade me of his point, the best evidence he could provide would be statements from Rudy to the effect that this administration's wire-tapping and FISA-dodging were only the beginning of how President Giuliani would deal with the problem.

Moving on, Jim's second point is that:

What drove [Giuliani] 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.

That reminds me of something one of my staunchly Republican colleagues recently said. If Giuliani wants to win the nomination, he has to develop a more comforting, Reagan-esque demeanor rather than the pit-bull attitude he's often been known for.

But Jim is focused on Rudy's ability to be president, not to win the nomination. And on that front, I don't find his abrasiveness all that troubling. If President Giuliani were as effective a policymaker as Mayor Giuliani, being abrasive wouldn't really matter. To put it differently, if the war in Iraq had been immaculately planned, would anyone still care about whether it was undiplomatic for Bush to label America's enemies an "axis of evil"?

Labels: Rudy Giuliani

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# Posted 11:29 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

IT'S GIULIANI TIME: The always top-notch pair of Douthat & Salam take a very interesting look at the Giuliani candidacy in the Weekly Standard. They begin by describing Giuliani's strategic flip-flop during his unsuccesful campaign for mayor of New York in 1989:

Assuming that he'd be running against the blue-collar, socially conservative Democrat Ed Koch, Giuliani cast himself as a liberal. Playing against his tough-guy image, he spent his first months on the campaign trail talking about the victims of homelessness and AIDS and drug abuse, causes that united elite liberals and poor minority voters while leaving the city's shrinking middle class cold...

Then fate intervened: David Dinkins defeated Koch in the Democratic primary, and Giuliani became, by necessity if not by design, the candidate of the unfashionable middle-class strivers living in the outer boroughs, voters who recognized something of themselves in Giuliani, a self-made Italian-American from Brooklyn. Thus was born the polarizing, hard-charging, and proudly uncompassionate Giuliani who, after losing to Dinkins in 1989, beat him in 1993 and went on to transform New York.

Not a pleasnt memory, but probably ancient history as far as 2008 is concerned. More relevant are the strengths that Giuliani brings to the table this time around:

His genius wasn't for cutting government ("down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," as [Grover] Norquist famously put it) but rather for reforming it and making it work for the working and middle-class taxpayers who elected him, rather than elite liberals who had run City Hall into the ground. He offered a municipal version of the reformism that governors like Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson (who passed on his welfare czar to Giuliani) and Michigan's John Engler pursued at the state level in the 1990s--a conservatism targeted explicitly to voters who wanted to keep the welfare state in place but didn't want the Democrats to run it.

I think competence is going to be a big issue in 2008, because even a lot of Republicans feel that it went AWOL during the Bush administration. Although there's no reason to think John McCain is incompetent, it's always harder for a legislator to demonstrate competence as opposed to a candidate who has served as a cheif executive.

As for McCain, Ross & Reihan write that he:

Tends to embrace the elite media's pet causes, from campaign finance reform to the patient's bill of rights, a Giuliani "respect conservatism" would be proudly anti-elitist, emphasizing issues that resonate with working and middle class Americans.

That strikes me as a little unfair. One might even say that McCain trasformed campaign finance into the elite media's pet cause, not to mention a signature issue for himself. More generally, I think it's going to be hard to paint John McCain as an elitist. It is possible for conservatives to paint him as too moderate or too liberal, but those kinds of attack would hardly justify nominating Giuliani.

Labels: John McCain, Rudy Giuliani

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