Giuliani: Start Spreading the News
BROOKS, DAVID
Giuliani: Start Spreading the News By David Brooks It takes a rude man to make a civil society. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani created a diplomatic contretemps late last month when he threw Yasser...
...New York is benefiting from a nationwide drop in crime...
...For days, Giuliani had been saying that Arafat and Fidel Castro were not welcome at the event...
...He is far from moderate in his attitude toward civil society or the political system he inherited...
...But when the police came in to remove the homeless back in 1989, she joined a riot against the cops, energized by ideological zeal...
...Making tough speeches in the culture war is fine, but there's greater toughness in a politician who, while lacking ideological rigor, takes on the disasters of the last 50 years of urban policy, and prevails more often than anyone could have imagined in his wildest dreams...
...Giuliani says that the most important thing he learned as a prosecutor was the ability to make decisions quickly...
...Giuliani has an evident taste for power, and he uses it with gusto-a gusto that, pointed in the wrong direction, can do real harm...
...Giuliani has raked Silver over the coals at press conferences...
...In conversation with journalists, politicos, and other observers, especially sympathetic ones, one is regaled with stories of Giuliani's indulging his love of conflict, attacking good people, savaging those who deserve better...
...The PLO leader sat silently as Mastro told him he was not welcome, but a PLO aide was incredulous...
...The problem with Giuliani's Manhattan critics is that they want somebody with the Crossfire virility to clean up their streets but also with the MacNeil-Lehrer manners they admire...
...You have control over one of the most rigorously selected teams of prosecutors in the country...
...He directed law-enforcement officials to march into Kidder, Peabody and other brokerage firms, handcuff alleged insider traders in front of their peers, and cart them off to jail...
...To establish authority over the streets, Giuliani and Bratton drew on two social science theories...
...He had already dispatched Mastro to tell Arafat to leave...
...He struggled bitterly with his own schools chancellor, Raymond Cortines...
...Giuliani is also a bracing presence in a country that is much concerned with community and civil society...
...He has forced the Mafia from the Fulton Fish Market, which it had dominated for six decades...
...He makes decisions quickly...
...This was, after all, a direct challenge to his power and could not go unanswered...
...But just before going on stage at Avery Fisher Hall to make his remarks, the mayor was told that the PLO delegation had been seated two boxes down from his chief of staff, Randy Mastro...
...A few leftists still equate efforts to squash bestiality magazines today with philistine efforts to suppress Ulysses 60 years ago...
...Once Giuliani had decided not to invite Arafat to the concert, he could not have backed down...
...Meanwhile, Giuliani's bid to gain greater control over city government itself has been even more aggressive, and far messier...
...Giuliani's goal has been to abolish the independent Board of Education and bring the schools more directly under his authority...
...He's simply bullheaded enough to bust through the political inertia and bring policy up to date with the social consensus...
...Do you know who you are talking to...
...He endorsed the losing Democrat, Mario Cuomo, over the winning Republican, George Pataki, in the 1994 gubernatorial election...
...He was delighted when a staffer found a 1988 quotation in which Koch had branded Arafat a "murderer," and he used the quotation to justify his move all day...
...Maybe you can make a startling difference merely by instituting a few mundane acts of good government that restore civic authority over the streets...
...The press is so put off by the months of bad blood his feuds create, that it neglects the progress that emerges when Giuliani triumphs...
...A loner, Giuliani will probably not leave a broad reform movement behind when his time in office expires...
...The Times wrote that I had totally ruined my ability to work with the city council...
...he asked...
...The State Department, the White House, the New York media, and former mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins protested...
...Eighth Street in Greenwich Village had become a sleazy gathering point...
...Last month he oversaw passage of an anti-pornography bill that largely pushed porn merchants out of Times Square and residential neighborhoods...
...Giuliani sees himself as someone who never backs down, and he's proud of it...
...It's not in his nature...
...official Gillian Sorensen (wife of Ted) protested it would be awfully embarrassing...
...In the evening, in the van on the way to the opening of the Broadway musical Victor/Victoria, he came back to Koch again...
...Finally Cortines resigned, deciding that the assault on his dignity had gone far enough...
...He needs to be focused on or he's never going to change...
...Giuliani is an anti-Clinton...
...And individualism, in the form of a political leader with few ties to established parties or interests...
...I think we're going to get it...
...In fact, there were only about 190 of them, and they were not violent, but they loomed large in the psychology of the city...
...John Chafee, is to miss the point...
...Another way of putting it is that he became comfortable with power...
...He knows who he is...
...The only critic who got under his skin was Ed Koch...
...The corruption they engendered led to the professionalization of city management, with urban planners dominant from the mid-1940s onward...
...And he has used the power he has accumulated to stomp on the forces that threaten the social fabric...
...New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani created a diplomatic contretemps late last month when he threw Yasser Arafat out of a concert the mayor was hosting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations...
...The national discussion about community is often warm, fuzzy, and pointless...
...On the liberal Upper West Side of Manhattan, and in Greenwich Village, people support the Giuliani/Bratton measures...
...Marlin got 1 percent of the vote...
...Giuliani snapped when she started repeating herself...
...While some argued that the police should focus on major crimes, Giuliani saw the small eyesores-graffiti on a train, garbage on an open plot of land, or aggressive panhandling on a thoroughfare-as evidence of government weakness...
...He takes liberal positions on abortion and gay rights...
...Giuliani's actions as mayor have been variations on a theme: Give me the ball, let me control it, hold me responsible...
...While it's interesting to wonder if Americans bowl alone, perhaps the more immediate task is to make sure decent people feel comfortable hanging outside the bowling alley late into the night...
...He and the press loathe each other...
...He ended up going on the ABC's Brinkley show instead...
...Silver recently sponsored an education summit, and Giuliani was subjected to oceanic criticism when he refused to go...
...The Giuliani approach is based on suppression of the anti-social...
...In the two years since he was elected mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani has waged a relentless pressure campaign against those who violate his sense of decency...
...A lot of the liberal distaste for him is aesthetic...
...In the 1993 mayor's race, a few nationally known conservatives campaigned for George Marlin, running on the Conservative party line...
...The administration's self-image is of a band of courageous fighters taking on a political establishment that has been entrenched since the New Deal...
...Koch is such a fake," Giuliani muttered to himself in the elevator on the way to a noon TV interview...
...Amid a sea of squirming second and third graders, he went on about the job-creating potential of the private sector and his efforts to make city contracting more efficient...
...Giuliani asks...
...The streets and parks are cleaner...
...He removed the squeegee men, who used to menace drivers trapped at red lights under the guise of washing their windows...
...The mayor's policies to improve the quality of life have been remarkably free of controversy...
...On pornography, graffiti, homelessness, and a range of other issues, the consensus has shifted away from self-expression to the imposition of civic order...
...Now prosecutors hold sway...
...Enough...
...Giuliani told her to get part-time work and to stop complaining because average taxpayers were massively subsidizing her education...
...He moves ahead by pressure and confrontation, especially since he sees himself as an outsider elected to revolutionize the system...
...The New York Times suggested that Giuliani was crassly trying to curry favor with the Jewish vote...
...Community" and "civil society" are the hottest social-science topics around Washington, inside think tanks, and on the nation's campuses...
...In these quarters, the debate has focused on moral breakdown, illegitimacy, the decline of trust, and other deep social trends...
...But he exemplifies the only style of conservatism that can survive right now in America's big cities...
...It's worth dwelling on his attitude toward the lone holdout, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, because it reveals how Giuliani plots strategy in these fights...
...It's hard to talk about Giuliani without hearing the phrase "control freak...
...And they are indebted to the broken-window theory developed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling-that if a broken window goes unfixed, people feel free to vandalize the whole building...
...It's been a series of battles, feuds, and conflicts...
...New York is now the safest city in America with a population over 1 million...
...That's what he wants...
...People who don't show up for their court dates are more likely to be tracked down...
...First, they cite Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that America has been defining deviancy down, lowering its standards of tolerable public activity...
...Giuliani's method is wildly unpopular with the political class...
...It is typical of his brawls that even amidst the bad blood, he has made progress, so that now most political leaders have adopted versions of his view...
...But the measure, shepherded through the laborious regulatory process by City Planning Chairman Joseph B. Rose, passed easily through the Democratic city council to city-wide applause...
...For decades, cities were governed by political machines...
...Cortines is a thoughtful man willing to admit his own vulnerabilities...
...Giuliani's most long-standing struggle has been to gain control of the city's dysfunctional education system...
...attorney for the Southern District of New York, as he was from 1983 to 1989, is to come as close to possessing absolute power as a democratic system allows...
...He drives away those who would be allies most of the time...
...On a call-in show late last month, a student at one of the city colleges complained to Giuliani about a small tuition hike...
...Urban policy in New York merely needed to catch up with cultural gains...
...And he posits that the important thing is not to be liked, but to hold power, so that your opponents have to deal with you whether they want to or not...
...You got to have a little more wisdom...
...Giuliani won by a mere 2.5 percentage points over Dinkins...
...Within the police department, precinct commanders now have the power to go after prostitution, public urination, the sale of marijuana, the sale of alcohol to minors, and cars that use massive stereo equipment to disturb the peace...
...Ed Koch predicts that the relationship between the two is so poisoned that Bratton will quit within a year...
...It's a style of government concerned with the traditional subjects of political philosophy: power, force, and authority...
...Giuliani does not move ahead by cooperation...
...Addressing the opening night Broadway audience, he scanned the crowd and joked, "I guess you can all stay...
...But he is not lovable even when it might help him...
...He's much funnier than you might expect, but he's not a storyteller or a showman...
...Now a walk down that street is much less menacing...
...And Giuliani is the epitome of the prosecutorial type...
...In a small backstage room, Giuliani sketched out a few options with his aides and decided within seconds to boot Arafat...
...And his success in New York suggests that maybe you don't need a moral reawakening or a religious revival to see remarkable improvements in civil society...
...If you only have a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail," Manhattan's leftist borough president Ruth Messinger says, condemning Giuliani's style...
...I used to know a woman who lived off Tompkins Square Park who would complain bitterly when the homeless defecated in her vestibule...
...Does it make sense to negotiate with [Silver] or does it make sense to wait until he's in an area to make reasonable compromise...
...He largely prevailed in bloody fights with the city council, reining in a $2.3 billion deficit and reducing the city workforce by 15,000 jobs...
...New York needed somebody who didn't come out of what was a pretty rotten political system," Giuliani says of his 1993 victory in the mayor's race, when he became the first Republican in Gracie Mansion since John Lindsay departed two decades before...
...Once he starts something, he finishes it...
...He wants to be a critic because he can get more attention...
...It's been a two-front war...
...He doesn't feel the need to be loved...
...To be a U.S...
...He ignores the culture war...
...And we've surrounded him pretty effectively...
...To call him a Republican moderate, as if he were Sen...
...Even sympathetic observers say that his economic and regulatory reforms have been modest...
...If Marlin had made a stronger showing, Giuliani would not be mayor today and the city would be infinitely worse off...
...Giuliani reminds us that communities are made possible by leaders who can maintain authority and, in this way, control streets and uphold community standards of decency...
...You are barely subjected to press oversight (unless you court it), and if someone leaks one of your internal documents about an ongoing investigation, he is breaking the law...
...He has waged a relentless and often messy campaign to exercise more power over the city...
...If I begin negotiating with him, I take the pressure off...
...That was incredibly foolish...
...a police union that will use its pull in Albany to thwart efficiency reform...
...These days nobody makes a fuss when Bratton tells panhandlers to "get off drugs, get off the booze, get off your ass, and get a job...
...Several minutes later the PLO delegation decamped...
...He seemed unfazed when the charges were later dropped...
...Ed Koch and other experienced city fathers were deeply skeptical of its chances...
...Many of his victories have been gained through sheer force of will...
...In the days following the Arafat episode, Giuliani's love of combat was on ample display...
...And since nothing he does can go unaccompanied by a scrap, he's even feuded for credit with police commissioner Bratton...
...He's not ready at this point...
...People don't do that anymore...
...He was under attack from all quarters of the globe, but as he rode in his white van from event to event, he was energized and triumphant...
...But the city's gains are due only partly to demographics...
...You have the power to ruin people merely by investigating them...
...At the primary school just after the Arafat incident, he greeted an assembly of kids...
...But, except from the pornogra-phers themselves, there was little opposition...
...The homeless now tend to spend their days sitting on park benches, whereas before they were likely to be found sleeping on the sidewalk...
...And, in a lonely battle, he is fighting to exert authority over a municipal system that in the course of 50 years had become bloated, unfocused, and decrepit...
...These campaigns against the smaller violations have had an effect on major crime...
...The Times was wrong...
...When the market's key building was destroyed in an arson fire two days after the Giuliani initiative, the mayor redoubled his efforts...
...It will appear as if he's trying to make changes, and we'll be in a semantic debate about whether he is or isn't...
...Stores were beginning to close early...
...Its declines have been up to six times greater than the national average...
...When Giuliani talks about the New York City government, he describes a system of mutual indulgences in which each interest will fiercely defend its accumulated privileges: a fire department that will organize a hostile media campaign to cow a reformist fire commissioner...
...The Giuliani administration and the police department under Commissioner William Bratton have taken huge strides to make New York a more civil place...
...Koch called Giuliani a "horse's ass" who had disgraced the city...
...And in the first nine months of this year the murder rate declined an additional 30 percent...
...The Genovese family's vigorish made fish slightly more expensive in restaurants, but many of the firms that bought and sold within the market were more afraid of the anti-Mafia disruption than upset by the costs of continued mob control...
...When people see these things, and see that they don't get fixed," he says, "then over a period of time citizens get the impression that no one's in charge...
...One of Giuliani's first acts as mayor was to go after the squeegee men...
...Giuliani is no philosopher king who inspires a moral revival...
...Indeed, the entire New York experience might suggest that the nation isn't in such advanced moral decay...
...You got to see a few days down the line...
...And the police and fire departments are Giuliani's friends...
...Democrats are correct to point out that many of the policing and workfare measures that Giuliani celebrates were actually started, in less ambitious form, in the Dinkins administration...
...There were no irate calls in protest...
...an educational system that is rotten through and through...
...He has expanded a workfare program so that now he has 24,000 people cleaning up parks, schools, and other public spaces...
...But he is a remarkably successful mayor and a new kind of Republican...
...He has worked with Commissioner Bratton to establish authority over the streets...
...Giuliani hired Cortines, who is socially conservative, but soon became convinced that Cortines had allowed himself to be rolled by those under his command...
...Social critics talk about the need for "mediating institutions" and the corrosive effects of rap music, talk radio, and trash TV Giuliani's approach to civil society has none of this...
...I told them at the time their view was a joke...
...Nonetheless, the Mafia domination of the fish market was an affront to civic authority...
...In some ideal world such a person might exist, but in reality, most people have the faults of their virtues...
...That undermines the social fabric...
...He earned immense sympathy in Manhattan, including an admiring profile in the New Yorker, but clearly he had no place in Giuliani's New York...
...I made exactly the same decision Ed Koch would have made if he were still sitting where I'm sitting," he said...
...The market is a series of buildings in lower Manhattan, at which more than $1 billion worth of fish is sold each year to metropolitan-area restaurants and wholesalers...
...He answered dozens of hostile questions from reporters and was excited when his communications director let him know, amidst a visit to a Manhattan primary school, that she'd received a call from CBS's Face the Nation...
...We had tremendous battles over the first budget," he says...
...People may watch trash TV in the daytime with whatever fantasy part of the brain such activity occupies, but in real life, even New Yorkers do not have an anything-goes ethos...
...The results have been dramatic...
...He went after the Mafia even though its control of the Fulton Fish Market doesn't have much effect on New Yorkers...
...An attacker of a bad system, he has not been a dramatic policy innovator...
...Four of the best mayors in the country-Ed Rendell of Philadelphia, Richard Daley of Chicago, Stephen Goldsmith of Indianapolis, and Giuliani-made their bones as crime busters...
...The city's crime rate fell an astonishing 32 percent in 1994, with robbery down 22 percent...
...Four out of the five major players support my proposal to do away with the board...
...And maybe like a fastball pitcher, Giuliani is more fearsome and effective for being occasionally wild...
...The anti-pornography measure that passed last month succeeded after years of failed attempts...
...Giuliani criticized him and pressured him to stand up for himself, calling Cortines "precious" and "a little victim...
...It was an over-reaction to today's events...
...Their elimination has become the most discussed symbol of New York's regeneration...
...He pushed through a merger of the transit and housing police with the NYPD, a reform that had been needlessly foiled for decades...
...His success might give conservatives pause about their insistence on supporting candidates only if they rigorously adhere to a set of conservative policy positions...
...Aggressive panhandling has been curtailed...
...Statistics are now updated daily so that precinct commanders can see which blocks are emerging as crime zones...
Vol. 1 • November 1995 • No. 9
