Giuliani reconsidered

While I am the farthest thing from a fan of Rudolph Giuliani as a presidential contender, Steven Malanga writing in City Journal reminds me of the remarkably successful, and genuinely conservative, aspects of his mayoralty. Giuliani is of course a social liberal, a marcher in homosexual parades, a repeat cross-dresser (see Donald Trump smooching with “Miss” Giuliani in 2000), a three-times married man, and the public trasher of his second wife and the mother of his children, who now galavants around with his third wife constantly mentioning her to political audiences who, thank you, would rather not be reminded, and making us long for the day when the most men did in public with their wives was dance with them instead of make love with them. Giuliani also has a vulgar, off-putting persona, a face that’s hard to look at, and a harsh, lisping voice that is even more unpleasant to listen to. Yet, as mayor, when it came to his dealings with crime, with the barbarians known as “black leaders,” with city taxes and spending, with welfare reform, and with the constant attacks on him from the destructive left, Giuliani was intelligent, gutsy, and effective—a genuine leader. I’m not at all endorsing him for the presidency. I cannot imagine myself voting for him. I cannot “see” him as a president. At the same time, as appalling as Giuliani is as a person, one must be fair in acknowledging his genuine abilities and accomplishments.

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Larry G. writes:

Did you see this, from YouTube?

The man has enough confidence in himself and in his own masculinity to march with gays and poke fun at himself. That kind of self-confidence is good in a leader. As for the rest, yes, he’s done some lousy things, but remember that “Nice guys finish last” in politics and often in life. It may be better to vote for a sonofabitch if he can be our sonofabitch. He may be bad on immigration, but I’m encouraged by the fact that he has been willing to reverse himself on issues when he sees that his earlier views were wrong. He can be educated.

The names I’m hearing for 2008 are Hillary!, Obama, McCain and Giuliani. If that’s the choice, I’ll vote Giuliani.

James N. writes:

A good way to judge Rudy is by his enemies. As you know very well, the entire left-wing mob in the five boroughs hated Rudy with a passion rare even for them. Sharpton, Maddox, Norman Siegel, the NYCLU saw in Rudy what the Rove-intoxicated “social conservatives” fail to see, and they acted on it.

They marched, chanted, spoke, wrote, and acted out every day for eight years.

And Rudy beat them at their own game, every day, for eight years.

Think about the way our Republican “leaders” scurry like cockroaches at the mildest reproach from leftists in Congress and the media. Then think about Rudy telling that Saudi prince to shove ten million dollars up his toches, or telling the cops to arrest Arafat if he set foot outside of the UN zone, because he was a terrorist.

Mr. Auster, if you were running for President I would vote for you.

But Rudy Giuliani is an unusual character, worth a second look by you.

Howard Sutherland writes:

I just read this. I agree with both of Larry’s points, as I understand them: (i) Giuliani did a pretty good job as New York’s mayor (John Lindsay or David Dinkins he wasn’t, thank God!), and was a steadying influence after September 11th—although I think that gets overstated; and (ii) Giuliani would be a terrible president of the United States.

Given the nature of the job and, even more so, the very strange nature of New York City, someone with Giuliani’s often unpleasant attributes – as long as they are leavened by some common sense and a reasonably thick skin – can be an effective mayor of New York. After the execrable Dinkins and the Crown Heights pogrom, in Giuliani the man and the moment met, although I wish he had not perpetuated New York’s illegal alien sanctuary policy, an obvious conflict with his adherence to the broken window theory in other matters.

But the president, like it or not, is the preeminent national moral leader in the United States. The Founding Fathers did not intend the president to become a secular sovereign, but the decay of American civic life combined with the growth of American power in the world has made him one. Do we really want Giuliani’s in-ya-face Noo Yawk style – a strange combination of you-messin’-wit’-me? belligerence and cry-in-public sentimentality – there? I don’t want someone as libertine as Giuliani seems to be in the bully pulpit. I definitely don’t want someone as defiantly open-borders and diversity/multicult-mongering as Giuliani there (I know Bush and McCain are bad on the same issues, but we’re talking about Rudy here). And I remember Giuliani’s tour as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he went well beyond busting mobsters to abusive prosecutions of Wall Street figures great and small – a GOP Eliot Spitzer. His arm-twisted convictions in the U.S. District Court in New York had an unusually high reversal rate at the hands of the Second Circuit. Somehow I don’t think abusive and intrusive extensions of federal power would trouble Giuliani at all.

I would like to agree with Larry G., but I suspect Giuliani is just tacking to starboard for GOP tactical reasons. James N. mentions some of Giuliani’s attention-getting stands on principle in New York; New York is a great place for grandstanding, and it got Rudy great press in the (Noo Yawk) Post. I don’t think it would work nationally. In any case, rather than growl at Jackson, Sharpton and other ethnic shake-down artists as he affected to do from City Hall, I fear a President Giuliani would invite them to the White House to kick off Black, Hispanic, Asian, “Gay”… History Month, all at the expense of ordinary Americans, while lauding illegal aliens and importing still more of the Third World. Given how casual he is about his Catholicism (he seems to take it about as seriously as Pelosi does), can anyone believe that he will see or speak the truth about Islam and Moslem immigration? How would he be an improvement over President Bush?

Unrelated to Rudy’s individual merits is the open question of whether the national electorate would elect a politician from New York City president today. I doubt it – most people out there in flyover country think New York is weird, decadent and hopelessly liberal, an alien place. (Think of the famous New Yorker cover, only in reverse.) Are they altogether wrong?

Steven H. writes:

Guiliani is my choice. I believe that his commitment to strict constructionists judges is more important than some politicians views on anything when and if they do not have the guts to fight for their views or more importantly the judges that are needed to keep those views in the hands of the people and their elected legislators.

Guiliani IMO is the only realistic candidate that will fight against the Lindsay Graham? John McCain Harriet Meiers type candidates for the Supreme Court.

He fought the major league race baiters, Sharpton, Jackson et al. He fought the Mob. He took an urban cesspool and turned it around.

He is articulate. When called PC names, he will jam it back. He took a Saudi check for $10M and told them to stuff it while the Bushies and Kudlow’s were telling people to go pray in their churches, synagogues and MOSQUES!

BTW McCain can’t win and certainly Romney can’t win the General election.

Rudy puts NY, NJ, Pa, and maybe even CA in play.

Vincent C. writes:

Whether it is mainly due to the paucity of impressive GOP congressional candidates, or a lack of someone outside the GOP’s “Washington Party” that has sufficient national name recognition, the efforts of the disparate segments of the leadership of the Republican Party, plus a few in the media, to elevate people like Condelezza Rice and Rudolph Giuliani to serious presidential consideration say a great deal about the current state—and malaise—of the “party of Lincoln.” Rice has said, repeatedly, that the only job she seeks is head of the National Football League, which will be no great loss to the nation, but Giuliani seems set to make a run for the GOP presidential nomination. Unlike Steven Malanga, I (and Howard Sutherland) believe Giuliani’s achieving victory is highly improbable, due largely to the heavy baggage he will have to carry on his way to the nominating convention.

Rudolph Giuliani’s rise to public stardom came about only after enough residents of the NYC could no longer abide the mind boggling incompetence of the Dinkins administration. This Malanga details, and, to this occasional visitor, NYC certainly appeared cleaner and safer in Giuliani’s early tenure. That star rose dramatically after the terrorist attack, plaudits Giuliani deserved, but it should be noted that long before 9/11, Giuliani’s “conservatism” was “fiscal,” not “social.” It is instructive, then, to review the kudos of not only writers like Steven Malanga, but, for example, reporters for The American Spectator, who have also added fuel to the fire in raising national expectations about the Giuliani nomination.

Full disclosure: I am a board member of the American National Council for Immigration Reform, and I believe that Giuliani’s failure to address the issue of illegal immigration into Gotham is characteristic of what he would do as president in stemming the flow of those “unlawfully present” into this nation—nothing. I note, with interest, that Malanga has very little to say about Giuliani’s treatment of this issue—and with good reason. True, with the Tancredo exception, no other GOP presidential hopeful is better in this matter, but for all Giuliani’s use of the police to reduce crime, especially in the reduction of car thefts, he has, hitherto, not dealt as a conservative who would enforce current immigration law in stopping illegal immigration into the nation; in fact, during his recent fund raising sojourn to California, Giuliani’s major contributors were identified as “open borders” advocates. But that is not all.

Malanga also conveniently leaves out that during Giuliani’s tenure, NYC became a “sanctuary city,” similar to Los Angeles, in which “New York’s finest,” used so effectively in dealing with crime, were ordered not to cooperate with Federal immigration officials. [LA adds: I believe NYC was effectively, if not formally, a “sanctuary” city at least as far back as the Koch administration; Giuliani simply carried forward the policy of his predecessors.] Further, it was during Giuliani’s reign that NYC public employees were informed that providing information to Federal officials about illegal aliens was sufficient grounds for losing their jobs! Not the message, one would think, that a “conservative” official would send.

I need not add to the litany of personal peccadilloes that Giuliani brings with him. How any conservative—fiscal or social—could, knowing these character flaws, still vote for this man is beyond my ken. Rudolph Giuliani may have been a successful prosecutor, and even an effective mayor, but he is not the right man to lead the nation.

LA writes:

I agree with Mr. Sutherland and Vincent C. For years, ever since conservatives began approvingly reporting the fact that conservative audiences love Giuliani for president, I have been (1) appalled at their support for him for president, (2) amazed that they would think he could be nominated by the Republican party, and (3) also amazed that they didn’t see that if he were nominated, it would mean the breakup of the party. Now, has his statement that he would appoint justices like Alito and Scalia altered that situation? Maybe slightly, but not enough to change his risible unsuitability as a GOP nominee.

I wrote my (highly qualified) admiring comments about Giuliani at the beginning of this entry not to endorse him but to be fair to him.

Vincent C. writes:

Just a brief explanation of my post of yesterday, which I note with pleasure you published. Mille grazie.

When I wrote that Giuliani made NY a “sanctuary city,” you pointed out, correctly, that such a policy preceeded Giuliani’s tenure. You were right … but so was I.

In 1989, the hapless Dinkins administration issued NY Executive Order 124, which forbade NYC municipal employees to cooperate with the (then) INS in identifying illegal aliens. The edict was in effect when Giuliani took office.

In 1996, however, a federal law (referred to as IIRIRA) overruled 124. The following year, a week or so after the new federal law, which prevented the city from taking punitive action against its employees who cooperated with INS, took effect, Giuliani, as mayor, sued, claiming that IIRIRA was a violation of the 10th Amendment. He lost: the District Judge, who wrote that NYC could not use “passive resistance” to prevent the law from being enforced, threw the case out; the 2nd Circuit (no conservative bastion), sided with the District Court’s decision, and, in 1999, the Supreme Court would not even hear the case.

Then, six days before 9/11, Giuliani’s hand-picked charter-revision people reinstituted, with the mayor’s blessing, the banned ordinance 124, and it has been in effect ever since—it has never been challenged. Hence, Giuliani did not institute 124, but he re-started its enforcement.

Just to set the record straight.

LA replies:

Thanks for this. Question: Since all the courts had found against 124, how could Giuliani re-institute it?

I want to point out, however, that Giuliani’s position was not without reason. His position was that immigration was a federal responsibility, and since the federal government was allowing so many illegals to enter the country, cities had to deal with the situation as they actually found it. Cities argued plausibly that they had an interest in illegal residents not being afraid of reporting crimes and accidents, for example, not being afraid of getting medical care, and so on.

Frankly, I think there is something to this. The federal government was failing to do its most fundamental job of protecting the country, and the impact of that failure fell on state and local governments. Federal enforcement was extremely lax and intermittant, almost whimsical. This made a case for the cities not to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing laws that the federal government itself was barely enforcing. If, on the other hand, the federal government was doing its utmost both to protect the border and to round up illegals on a consistent basis, then the cities would have had a much weaker case for refusing to cooperate.

The larger point is: once we allow a huge illegal population into the country, certain results are going to obtain. Illegal alien children will be filling schools for example. Since the illegals are HERE, there is an inevitable pressure to treat them equally. Thus we end up with Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court decision saying that school districts could not exclude illegal alien children. The only way to avoid a result like Plyler is for the federal government to be serious about keeping illegals out of the country in the first place and about expelling the ones that get into the country.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 12, 2007 04:01 PM | Send