There is a noticeable frisson of horror running through the New York media world over the Giuliani Presidential candidacy, tempered both by incredulousness over the sheer absurdity of the concept - "He's running for what?" - and a certain self-interest, because of course New Yorkers are most familiar with the Giuliani beat.

That's a good thing, because it's producing a vast raft of solid reporting that Progressive New Yorkers, most of whom are horrified at the idea of a Giuliani White House, can usefully employ in derailing this nonsense. At the same time, some circumspection is required, because many of the traits that City folks hated most about the man are foundational to his appeal in other parts of the country; and remember, running against New York has been a winning formula in the heartland since the implosion of Al Smith in the 1928 campaign. That, however, is exactly what Rudy is doing, running against the cliché of Sodom on the Hudson.

That's the case made by Peter J. Boyer in The New Yorker [1].

The base was willing to be convinced. Giuliani has led the Republican field in the national polls from the start, partly because of his September 11th celebrity but also because of his September 10th celebrity. The common refrain among New Yorkers is that although Giuliani showed leadership on the day of the terrorist attacks, in the preceding months he had been a spent and isolated lame duck, his viability sapped by churlishness and the spectacle of his unattractive personal dramas. 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 attacks 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. Speaking before the Alabama legislature this spring, he received a standing ovation, and Governor Bob Riley told him, “One of these days, you have to tell me how you really cleaned up New York.” To conservatives, pre-Giuliani New York was a study in failed liberalism, a city that had surrendered to moral and physical decay, crime, racial hucksterism, and ruinous economic pathologies. Perhaps the most common words that Giuliani heard when he travelled around the country this spring were epithets aimed at his city (“a crime-infested cesspool,” one Southern politician declared), offered without fear of giving offense. Giuliani cheerfully agreed.

It's a common misperception, eagerly fanned by the media, that Giuliani's appeal is based strictly on his leadership role in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Certainly, that role, or more precisely the media-burnished version thereof, plays a part in explaining the mayor's attractiveness to conservatives eager to keep terrorism at the top of the national agenda. However, Giuliani's stance against the cartoon liberalism that the heartland believes he overcame as mayor is an over-looked factor in that appeal. Arguing against Giuliani on this terrain is possible. That said, this argument can't, to be effective, take the form of embracing the stereotypes this particular meme is set up against: the ungovernable City, lavish welfare spending, and so on and so forth.

Rather, the line of attack here needs to tie into the way in which his style of governance emphasized the mayor's personality flaws and highlight a cliquish style of governance that the country, post-Bush, has reason to be wary of.

“Petty and vindictive” is the assessment of one of Giuliani’s most reliable foils, Stephen DiBrienza, a former City Councilman from Brooklyn who in 1998 was on the receiving end of a memorable act of mayoral pique.

DiBrienza opposed Giuliani on a minor measure, passing a law through the council that would require smaller homeless shelters as a crime-prevention and safety measure. In response, the mayor placed a homeless shelter in DiBrienza's district.

The Mayor called DiBrienza a “limousine liberal” and a “hypocrite,” and the administration announced plans to open a homeless shelter in a neighborhood in DiBrienza’s district. An eviction notice was sent to a state-run psychiatric clinic housed in a city-owned building, with the explanation that a homeless shelter was coming in. In addition to the clinic, which tended to five hundred patients a week, the building contained a senior-citizen center and a nonprofit children’s center.

“Think about it,” DiBrienza says now. “Here’s a guy who would go to that length, because I beat him on passing a law that requires smaller-bed shelters. Because we would not blink, he would throw kids, seniors, and the mentally ill out into the street. I mean, could I have written a better script to expose the fact of what he was?”

In the end, in the face of terrible publicity, the administration relented, and Giuliani dispatched a deputy, Joe Lhota, to broker a compromise. He himself offered no gesture of reconciliation. “I think he actually had no ability to do that,” DiBrienza, who now practices law in Brooklyn and teaches at Baruch College, says. “He couldn’t come to that point in the continuum where you extend your hand and someone shakes it, and maybe you don’t even speak, but there’s this recognition, whether it’s a smile that says, ‘O.K, you got me on this one, I’ll get you next time,’ or it’s the silent ‘O.K., you did what you had to do,’ like two competitors at a sporting event. I don’t think he got that.”

Evicting the elderly from a senior center in the service of a personal vendetta against a member of the legislature is, I suggest, not going to fly even in the Red States. And there are more examples of the dark vindictiveness that characterizes the Giuliani style of leadership - Patrick Dorismond comes to mind, who after his shooting was further victimized by having his government records released by the mayor himself.

Wayne Barrett in The Village Voice, meanwhile, takes aim at the central pillar of the Giuliani myth, 9/11, in a piece titled simply Rudy's Five Big Lies about 9/11 [2].

Nearly six years after 9/11, Rudy Giuliani is still walking through the canyons of lower Manhattan, covered in soot, pointing north, and leading the nation out of danger's way. The Republican frontrunner is campaigning for president by evoking that visual at every campaign stop, and he apparently believes it's a picture worth thousands of nights in the White House.

Indeed. The five big lies, meticulously debunked and, for good measure, ridiculed, are:

'I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it.'

'I don't think there was anyplace in the country, including the federal government, that was as well prepared for that attack as New York City was in 2001.'

Don't blame me for 7 WTC, Rudy says.

'Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.'

'Every effort was made by Mayor Giuliani and his staff to ensure the safety of all workers at Ground Zero.'

Barrett has been a lonely voice of truth about Giuliani in the midst of the frenzied hagiography put out by the traditional media, and if Progressives have any sense, we'll start highlighting him everywhere we can. On the well-discussed question of health concerns at Ground Zero, he writes:

When the cleanup effort was widely hailed as under-budget and ahead of schedule, there was no doubt about who was in charge. "By Day 4," the New York Times reported in a salute to the "Quick Job" at Ground Zero, "Mr. Giuliani, the Department of Design and Construction (D.D.C.), the Office of Emergency Management, contractors and union officials decided it was time to bring order to the chaos." Giuliani controlled access to the site as if it were his backyard. Yet, when the scope of the health disaster was clear on the fifth anniversary in 2006, he told ABC: "Everybody's responsible." Throwing federal, state, and city agencies into the mix, he diffused the blame. On the Today show the same morning, however, he was more accusatory: "EPA put out statements very, very prominent that you have on tape, that the air was safe, and kept repeating that and kept repeating that."

The city had its own test results, of course, and when 17 of 87 outdoor tests showed hazardous levels of asbestos up to seven blocks away, they decided not to make the results public. An EPA chief, Bruce Sprague, sent an October 5 letter to the city complaining about "very inconsistent compliance" with respiratory protection. Sprague, who wrote the letter only after unsuccessful conversations with Giuliani aides, likened the indifference in a subsequent court deposition to sticking one's head "over a barbecue grill for hours" and expecting no consequences.

Giuliani was complicit in the cover-up of the environmental hazards that have sickened literally thousands of first responders and clean-up workers at the World Trade Center site. As the rest of the article makes clear, he also failed to prepare for a terrorist attack despite the ample warning provided by the 1993 Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center, even going so far as to put the City's emergency command center in the site itself; failed to question potential police commissioners about terrorism; actually botched a counter-terrorism prosecution as U.S. Attorney; took credit for prosecutions, such as that of the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, in which he was not involved; and is described by Barrett as "oblivious to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing throughout his mayoralty".

Rudy Giuliani, dear America, is not who you think he is.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

[3] | [4] | [5] | [6] | [7] | [8] | [9] | [10] | [11]