Rudy Giuliani, too learned a lesson of how to succeed in the political arena. He was a McGovern Democrat in 1972, but the lesson he learned from watching winners like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan was different. As Kevin Baker tells us in his essay in Harpers Magazine, Rudy Giuliani won the New York City mayoralty by using the politics of fear and loathing. In America today there is a lot of fear. The Bush regime uses it to subvert Congress, intimidate the people, and press forward its disruptive agenda of world hegemony. In 1993, Guiliani beat black incumbent David Dinkins with a brand that posited the city, then experiencing urban crisis in it's transition to a post-industrial economy, as "ungovernable". The not so silent subtext was that the crisis existed because city government was in the hands of an ethnic minority that was soft on crime and poverty. The facts, in the form of falling major crime statistics (during Dinkin's term murder was down 13.7%, robbery 14.6%, burglary 17.6%, auto theft 23.8%) were countered by a race baiting campaign that attacked Dinkins' very legitimacy as mayor and fed on white fear of minorities getting out of control. In the fall of 1992, Giuliani gave a speech that inflamed some 10,000 white police officers who had just finished a march on City Hall to protest Dinkins' proposal for civilian oversight of police misconduct complaints. Many officers in the mob used racial epithets and carried signs condemning Dinkins in racial terms, such as "Dump the Washroom Attendant". To counteract the positive steps taken by Dinkins to combat crime, such as approving a tax surcharge to put 6,000 more police on the streets, Giuliani resorted to coded attacks. His campaign slogan was "One Standard, One City" implying that black New Yorkers were getting by with something under a black mayor. He often stated he was not for "surrender of the streets" to criminals.
This pitch struck home with white liberal voters, who saw a threat to their quality of life in the legion of annoying "squeegee men" and scruffy drug addicts on the streets. What mattered in the campaign was that white New Yorkers felt less safe with a black mayor. In a country were the brand is more important than the reality, Giuliani's racist appeal worked. He significantly increased his 1989 margins of victory in 'red boroughs' and cut his losses in 'blue' Manhattan and Brooklyn by some 50,000 votes thereby turning a narrow defeat in 1989 into a narrow victory in 1993. He won again against a popular, Upper West Side liberal woman in 1997. According to Baker, Giuliani achieved almost nothing of real significance in his two terms. But that is to be expected in post-ideological politics. Giuliani is good at symbolic attacks. He screamed at critical reporters and ranted at ferret owners on his radio talk show. He boycotted a city museum that displayed a controversial image of the Madonna. There were a series of ugly, brutal incidents that occurred during his police campaign against street crime. In one a security guard, Patrick Dorismond, was fatally shot after he was approached at random by undercover cops who insisted he sell them crack cocaine. In defense of his cops, Giuliani illegally opened and leaked to the
public the contents of Dorismond's sealed juvenile police file. He would say that his hard as nails persona comes with the territory. By the end of his mayoralty, many New Yorkers would say he is a bigoted bully.It would be distasteful to allege that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were meat for Giuliani's grinder. But his considerable substantive policy errors in the wake of the attack are largely ignored. His decision to put the city's $61 million command center on top of 109,000 gallons of fuel oil at 7 World Trade Center certainly caused the building's collapse. When it was hit by flaming debris an unprotected 6,000 gallon fuel tank above the mezzanine "ignited like a fuse". His Republican convention speech in which the ungovernable city had morphed into an ungovernable world because of the moral laxity of Europe was well received. He was favorably compared to Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Giuliani still uses the "no surrender" theme in the new context of a future, inevitable in his estimation, terror attack on the U.S. To say Giuliani has a checkered personal background by the standards of the Christian right is understatement. But a third of GOP voters consider Iraq their top priority and 17% choose terror. Only 7% choose abortion and only 1% choose gay marriage according to Pew Research. If his opponent in the 2008 presidential election is Barak Obama, we could see Giuliani return to a tried and tested racial subtext in the campaign to win over frightened liberal and independent white voters. If he becomes President we could see the worst excesses of the Bush regime that stem from the President's own character flaws repeated--cronyism, arrogant and bullying methods coupled with a contempt for legal process, authoritarian intolerance of criticism, a penchant for secrecy and rhetoric over substance, and a reliance on fear as a means of governance. Personality in politics is always a two edged sword.