It's My Party (27 page)

In a recent speech, Giuliani explained, he had mentioned that the Clinton administration had permitted the nation’s defense
spending to fall to historic lows. “You know what? Somebody in the Clinton administration said my figures were wrong. So I
went and checked. I was absolutely right.” Reading from a memo that a member of his staff had prepared—the only time throughout
the broadcast that Giuliani referred to notes—he reeled off a string of figures. “Defense spending as a proportion of GDP,”
he concluded, “has dropped to the lowest level since the Great Depression back in the 1930s, during the time that we were
disarming after the First World War without anticipating the Second World War. So like I said, I was absolutely right.”

Then Giuliani became the city’s head nurse, urging New Yorkers to donate blood to the Red Cross, which was facing a shortage
of Type O supplies. He wasn’t offering a pleasant suggestion. He was barking out a civic duty. “Everybody who’s eligible should
donate
now.”
He had just donated blood to the Red Cross himself. “It doesn’t hurt—well, except for a little prick. It’s good for your
character development, anyway.”

Next Giuliani took on the role of a priest, offering inspiration. He told the story of a young girl, Jamie, who was fighting
a brave battle against cancer. He had been keeping his listeners posted on Jamie. “So I just wanted you to know that she graduated
from fifth grade at P.S. 91 yesterday and she’s doing just fine. She inspires all of us about how to face life and make the
most of it.”

The mayor tapped a pencil on his desk. Moving to the last topic before taking calls, he became New York’s social director.
“And now to another point, the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade on Sunday. It’s going to be a terrific parade—a great opportunity
for New York to show how we are the most tolerant, the most loving, the most understanding city, in which people of different
views about politics, religion, and sexual orientation can see our connection as human beings.”

City Hall Park, the New York Knicks, the national defense budget, a Red Cross blood drive, a little girl fighting cancer,
and the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. At first I couldn’t see anything uniting these disparate topics except the mayor’s intense
nervous energy. Then I got it. Listening to Giuliani was like taking a walk down Broadway. You’d see office towers, theaters,
diners, rich people, poor people, whites, blacks, Jews, and Hispanics, and all that united them would be the buzz and energy
of the city. Rudy and the city, the city and Rudy. Say what you want about him, but he manages a feat that only a bravura
politician could accomplish. He personifies New York.

The mayor handled the first three calls without incident. Rocco from Brooklyn, a guard in a public school, called in to complain
that his superiors had transferred him to guard duty in the prison on Rikers Island. Giuliani spent a few puzzled moments
trying to figure out what had happened—a school guard should never have been transferred to prison duty—then told Rocco to
stay on the line while he had somebody in one of the deputy mayor’s offices talk to him. “T’anks, Mayor,” Rocco said. “I t’ink
you’re terrific.”

Anna from Harlem complained about garbage collection. Judith from Queens complained about bus service. Giuliani had them,
too, stay on the line to speak to people in a deputy mayor’s office, but not before demonstrating a detailed knowledge of
the routes of the city’s garbage trucks and buses. Anna and Judith both proved effusive in their thanks. Giuliani beamed and
thanked them in return.

Then came the call from Monroe in Staten Island.

Monroe informed Giuliani that the Republican leader of the Senate, Trent Lott of Mississippi, had once spoken before a white
supremacist group. Monroe asked whether the Republican mayor of New York approved of Lott or would be willing to denounce
him over the air. As Monroe spoke, Giuliani’s smile disappeared. His forehead creased in concern. He glanced across the room
at his press secretary, Sunny Mindel raising his eyebrows as if to ask whether she was aware of the charge against Senator
Lott. Mindel shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it,” she mouthed. Giuliani shrugged back. Then he attacked.

“I get the sense that this is a set-up question,” Giuliani said. “I’ll tell you what, Monroe. What do you think Democrats
should do about Al Sharpton?” Monroe began to accuse Giuliani of changing the subject, which Giuliani had certainly done.
Giuliani cut him off.

“Monroe, Monroe, Monroe, Monroe, you are a prejudiced, bigoted person. I have nothing to do with racists of any kind. I have
nothing to do with people who cause fires using the fuel of anti-Semitism [Al Sharpton once called a Jewish merchant in Harlem
a “white interloper”; later, the merchant’s store was torched]. The mere fact that you don’t want to deal with it [the question
about Al Sharpton] tells me you don’t want to be fair and impartial. The Republican Party has a problem with some people wanting
to be involved with it who appeal to racism. The Democratic Party has people like that in it also. You’ve got to be willing
to stand up against both of them. I want nothing to do with racism, and I can be clear and unambiguous about it whether it’s
Republicans or Democrats. But I think you are unable to do that, Monroe. I think you use racism as a partisan tool. Now we’ll
take a short break and be right back.”

Monroe had asked Giuliani a legitimate question. Not only refusing to provide an answer, Giuliani had denounced Monroe for
even asking. If Monroe in Staten Island hung up infuriated, he would not have been the first New Yorker to feel

that way after an encounter with the mayor.

* * *

Born to a working-class Italian family in Brooklyn in 1944, Rudolph Giuliani attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School,
then got a bachelor’s degree from Manhattan College and a law degree from New York University. At the age of twenty-six, he
joined the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and, three years later, he found himself
assigned to the narcotics unit, where it was his job to go after some of the most despicable people in New York, drug dealers.
Less than a decade later, at the age of thirty-nine, Giuliani was himself appointed United States Attorney for the Southern
District of New York. In his seven years in the position, he won 4,152 convictions, sending to prison still more despicable
people—murderers, mafiosi, white-collar criminals—while suffering only twenty-five reversals. Giuliani’s experience as a prosecutor
taught him to see life simply, as a battle between the forces of good and evil. If he sometimes overreacts, treating ordinary
citizens as suspects, as he did Monroe, New Yorkers appear willing to indulge him. They recognize that by 1993, when Giuliani
was elected, the city needed an avenger. The mayor’s temper, his high-handedness, his penchant for going on the attack—all
have earned him a dedicated corps of critics. Yet to many New Yorkers, these very traits prove that he is the right man for
the job.

Since taking office Giuliani has cut the crime rate in half, the murder rate by 70 percent. True, the crime rate has fallen
in other cities during the same period. But it has fallen further in New York, making the city, according to FBI statistics,
the safest city of more than one million inhabitants in the country.
^*
Giuliani has enacted more than $2.3 billion in tax reductions, cutting the personal income tax, the commercial rent tax,
the hotel occupancy tax, and the sales tax on clothing. Giuliani has reduced New York City’s welfare rolls by half a million,
a number so big that if all the people the mayor has moved off welfare established a city of their own, it would be the twenty-seventh
biggest in the nation. Since Giuliani took office New York City has created 325,000 new jobs and seen its unemployment rate
drop by almost half. If tangible accomplishments represent the measure of a politician, then Giuliani may be the most effective
politician in the nation. Yet Giuliani himself is proudest of something that cannot be seen or quantified. It is the new way
New Yorkers think about their city.

“New Yorkers used to assume several things about the city,” Giuliani said after the radio show. He slouched in an armchair
across from his desk, his legs stretched out, his arms behind his head. “They assumed that it had to be dangerous, that it
had to be dirty, that we were a welfare capital and we would stay that way, and that the city was unmanageable. That thinking
is gone now.”

Raised a Democrat, Giuliani explained, he became a Republican for three reasons. The first was the expansion of the welfare
state. “I recognized that the alignment of the parties was changing during the 1970s, and I did not agree with the dependency
philosophy that the Democratic Party was embracing, particularly in New York City. It seemed to me that the whole concept
of entitlement was very, very, very destructive.”

The second reason was foreign policy. “I thought that the Democratic Party, at least as represented by George McGovern and
his kind of thinking, did not have an appropriate appreciation of how strong America has to be to preserve freedom and democracy,”
Giuliani said. “The idea that we should demilitarize, that we should underfund the military—they just didn’t recognize how
dangerous the world is.

“The other thing I started to feel,” Giuliani said, explaining his third reason for joining the GOP, “was that the lack of
political competition was killing cities. I could see that this decrepit Democratic Party, which was all that existed in cities,
was able to count on everybody’s votes and not have to do anything for voters in return.”

In 1976, Giuliani voted for Gerald Ford, the first vote he had ever cast for a Republican. He has been a Republican ever since.

Giuliani makes many members of his own party uneasy, the more so now that he is running for the Senate. Some, particularly
those close to New York’s Republican governor, George Pataki, cannot forget 1994, when Pataki was running for governor against
the Democratic incumbent, Mario Cuomo. Giuliani crossed party lines to endorse Cuomo. (Asked about it now, all Giuliani will
do is shrug and say, “I made a mistake.”) Other Republicans object to Giuliani because he is pro-choice, pro–gun control,
and, as his radio paean to the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade made clear, pro–gay rights. They would vote against him if they
could. But they can’t. In New York politics, Giuliani is as conservative a candidate as they’re likely to get.

In any event fixating upon Giuliani’s liberal social positions misses a larger point. His central principles are inherently
conservative. Limited government. Public order. Individual responsibility. He has demonstrated that acting upon these principles
can transform even New York. In so doing, Giuliani has rendered Republicans a larger service than most of them realize. I
didn’t realize it myself until I wandered the streets of downtown Manhattan, looking for squeegee men.

Different as they are, George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani each solves a problem for the Republican Party. As we have seen,
George W. Bush demonstrates how the GOP can win. If he can ward off John McCain, Bush stands at least a chance of carrying
the voters inside the Finkelstein Box while appealing to those outside it.

Rudolph Giuliani solves a problem that is even worse. Ever since Ronald Reagan succeeded in achieving so much of his agenda,
the GOP has suffered from a certain aimlessness—the very aimlessness that I commented on when I began this journey on, so
to speak, Mount Reagan. The Berlin Wall is down. Free markets and democracy have swept the world. Our economy is booming.
What is left for Republicans to do? But if Giuliani can cut crime in New York, Republicans can cut crime anywhere in the nation.
If he can restore a sense of order and pride to New York, Republicans can restore order and pride to any city or town. You
see my point. Giuliani has made the unthinkable thinkable. If millions of American children are trapped in mediocre public
schools, why shouldn’t Republicans enact voucher programs to get them out? If the federal government still spends an amount
equal to a full one fifth of the GDP, why shouldn’t Republicans scale the federal government back? Or reform the tax code?
Or privatize Social Security? Giuliani himself might dissent from a social agenda, but why shouldn’t Republicans reduce abortions?
Or strengthen the institution of marriage?