Big Apple pie: with his election in the bag, Rudy Giuliani needs to worry about the future

National Review, Nov 10, 1997 by Richard Brooskiser

IN New York City, New Democrats aren't Bill Clinton or Dick Morris. They are Democrats who support Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani for re-election. One reason is opportunism. Their party's candidate is not going anywhere: Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger won a humiliatingly narrow victory in a Democratic primary that had the lowest turnout in years. The last time New York re-elected a Republican mayor was 1941, but the next time will be next month. The day after the primary, Mayor Giuliani received the submission of fifty Democrats who recognized this reality at a press conference in City Hall Park.

The party bolters spoke in generalities appropriate to the awkwardness of their situation. A city councilwoman from East New York said she believed that "bringing the city back to where it should be does not have one iota of race or party, but the man who can do the job." A state assemblyman from Bensonhurst said Giuliani came to his district four years ago "and listened very hardly." A labor leader recalled the words of a hymn: "'Let the work that I have done speak for me.' Let the work that he's done speak for him."

The mayor was there to speak for himself, in relaxed genial tones. This is not typical: the high forehead, the pale skin, the rigid jaw suggest a default mode of controlled fury, varied by uncontrolled fury. The defining fact about Giuliani's youth is that he was a Yankee fan who lived in the Brooklyn of the Dodgers. One day some young Dodger fans even tried to hang him from a tree. But he never recanted. The last time the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers met in a World Series, in 1956, the Yankees won -- "which I used for ten years to totally destroy all my Dodger relatives," Giuliani told one interviewer. That is the essential Rudy: the Righteous Scorekeeper. But the scent of triumph has for the moment mellowed him.

There is an intellectual case for Democratic supporters of Giuliani, which is made by the city councilman for the Lower East Side, Antonio Pagan (accent on the second syllable -- a useful distinction, in his district). Pagan is a gay Puerto Rican, but since he is opposed to bums living in parks, he is perceived locally as a paleoconservative. When Giuliani was first elected, "the city was falling apart. Giuliani gave voters a glimpse of hope that someone ballsy, aggressive, and tough could have an effect. Gays voted for him to have the streets cleaned up. Women are going to vote for him because he makes the streets safer for women." Meanwhile, "Where is the reaction of Democrats? What are the Democratic values to be upheld against Giuliani? Hypodermic needles? Crumbling schools? Violence?" Giuliani's record on crime and public order bears Pagan out. Since 1993, robbery and car theft have fallen by more than 40 per cent, and murder has fallen almost 50 per cent. New York has the lowest crime rate of any American city with a population over one million.

Unfortunately, there is another reason so many Democrats back Rudy. To buy time for his law-and-order reformation, he has acquiesced in some very old arrangements. The labor leader at the press conference put it concisely. "Rud-off Giuliani didn't lay off anybody." The structural reformation of government and the economy has been put off to the second term. Or more likely, as many New Yorkers would say, to next pesach (Yiddish for never).

RUDOLPH Giuliani, born in 1944, became famous in the mid Eighties, as a typical Eighties figure: a censor of corruption and greed. In the Seventies he had switched his registration from Democratic to Republican, and served a stint in the Reagan Justice Department. In 1983 he became U.S. Attorney for the southern District of New York, and his career took off. He was aggressive, headline-grabbing, none too scrupulous about the finer points of civil liberties, and often effective. He used the RICO Act against organized crime, and pioneered the use of asset forfeiture in prosecuting drug dealers. Most Americans don't mind cutting a few corners to get pushers and mobsters, but such techniques have, as the Supreme Court might say, penumbras. Giuliani bagged David Levine and Ivan Boesky in pursuit of Michael Milken, and in a spectacular bust he hauled two arbitrageurs from their desks at Goldman Sachs in handcuffs. In the latter case he overreached: the charges against the men were dropped. He also moved against political corruption in New York City, toppling the Democratic leaders of the Bronx and Queens (Donald Manes, the Queens chieftain, committed suicide rather than face the music).

POLITICS now beckoned. Mayor Ed Koch was at the end of his third term. Feisty and funny but no detail man, he had become the city's jester, and the act had worn thin. Rudy geared up to depose Koch in the 1989 mayoral race, using an old model, the fusion campaigns of John Lindsay and Fiorello LaGuardia -- an alliance of good-government types, Republicans, and liberals, capitalizing on popular boredom and discontent.

The coronation was interrupted, however, by a string of sensational crimes with racial angles. The last of them, the fatal beating of a black teenager by a mostly white mob in the white neighborhood of Bensonhurst, happened on the eve of the Democratic primary. (It was such a big story I first heard about it on television in Bangkok.) Koch lost to David Dinkins, a solemn hack, who went on in November to become New York's first black mayor.