THE LAZIO BOOMLET

...The protests had their effect...

...He unseated Dinkins in 1993 by a 51-48 percent margin and, in 1997, won reelection with 58 percent of the vote...

...Today, the conventional wisdom has moved toward the view that the Republican party would be better off rejecting Giuliani in favor of Rep...

...Their assertion was that the Diallo killing indicated the degree to which New York had become a near-fascist city during Giuliani's tenure, one in which blacks and Hispanics were the targets of systematic and deliberate harassment by the authorities...

...It is an axiom of New York politics that a Republican can win statewide if he can get 40 percent of the vote in the city, where 44 percent of the state's residents live...

...Let's turn back the clock to before the Lazio boomlet...

...Since the most reliable predictor of whether a politician will get a vote from somebody is whether somebody has cast a vote for him in the past, Giuliani's 58 percent total suggested it would take a miracle for him to lose...

...Giuliani's approval rating dropped from 60 percent to 40 percent— enough to convince Hillary Clinton she had a fighting chance against him...

...The Democrats looked at this record and quailed...

...Still, the state's Democrats had practically ceded the Moynihan seat to Giuliani...

...Even so, Giuliani is not a liberal Republican...

...Lazio supports a partial-birth ban...

...The Pataki camp looks at Giuliani's approval ratings and sees in them a reflection of its own feelings of loathing...

...John Podhoretz, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is associate editor/editorial page editor of the New York Post...

...It would not be overstating the case to say that the feeling between the Giuliani camp and the Pataki camp is one of hatred...

...First, in the person of Hillary Clinton, who is more popular than her husband—and her husband is already popular in New York state...

...The true nature of the Lazio boomlet is indicated by the degree to which it has been taken up heartily by the state's Democratic elite, whose members have taken to the airwaves of the TV and radio chat shows to talk up the virtues of a Long Island congressman they had barely heard of before the Pataki camp decided, against all evidence and reason, that he would be a more formidable candidate than the most formidable Republican New York has seen in decades...

...Giuliani has run in three elections in his life, all for mayor of New York City...

...Rick Lazio, a congressman from Long Island...

...And the protesters demanded change, even after the police department underwent a reorganization along the lines they were asking for...

...That potential miracle came in two guises...

...The first is closer to the mark...

...Municipal unions, smarting from Giuliani's tough negotiating tactics, joined the fray, as did the New York Civil Liberties Union and an array of leftist groups with which the Giuliani administration had been fighting for years...

...And in a move that ought to gladden the hearts even of those who find his stance on partial-birth abortion appalling, his effort to root porn shops out of residential neighborhoods has survived 21 court challenges, including an appeal to the Supreme Court...

...In the past six months, half of the city's porn businesses have closed up shop...

...There are four times as many Democrats as Republicans here...

...Charles Rangel in particular, had the antic idea of trying to talk Hillary Clinton into running, on the theory that only a superstar like the first lady had a prayer against him...

...Under the guidance of Al Sharpton, the most pernicious demagogue in the city, there were constant protests for two months...

...After all, only 30 percent of the state's registered voters are Republicans, while 47 percent are Democrats...

...While Lazio might be a good candidate in an ordinary elec-tion—and may become the Republican nominee if Giuliani should decide for some reason not to run—he could not compete against the sheer star power Hillary Clinton will bring to the race...

...The complaint: Giuliani wasn't sorry enough about the killing, even though he spent a week expressing remorse but also defending the New York Police Department from charges that it was racist...

...What they knew is this: Giuliani had a remarkable record to run on as the savior of a city that had become a petri dish for every social and political disease besetting America...

...Mayors of New York City and governors of the state have rarely been friendly, but the degree of animosity expressed by their respective aides, always on background or off the record but never hidden, is unique in my experience...

...Giuliani once seemed so unbeatable that some Democratic pooh-bahs, Rep...

...So they have trotted out Lazio, an attractive fellow with a lot of energy— and a good relationship with Pataki's mentor, former senator Al D'Amato, who is one of the Giuliani haters...

...Indeed, he has spent his six years as mayor in ideological warfare...

...Now, the idea that a Republican could simply coast into the seat left open by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's retirement is itself astounding...

...in 1996, Bill Clinton outdistanced Bob Dole 77 percent to 11 percent in the five boroughs...

...He almost won his first, in 1989, losing by only two points to David Dinkins...

...It is true that Giuliani has unambiguously rejected his party's social conservatism...

...five of them are Republicans...

...While the state's Republican chairman, Bill Powers, is enthusiastic about a Giuliani candidacy, the mayor's relations with George Pataki have never recovered from his foolish decision to endorse Mario Cuomo over Pataki in 1994...

...The Lazio boomlet is an outgrowth of this hatred...

...There are 51 members of the City Council...

...And the last two statewide elections have not been happy ones for the Republicans...

...THE LAZIO BOOMLET by John Podhoretz New York SEVEN MONTHS AGO, the conventional wisdom in the Empire State was that if New York City's Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani decided to run for the state's open Senate seat next year, it would be his for the taking...

...Chuck Schumer...

...More important than that, Giuliani has proved a remarkable vote-getter...

...Lazio is a moderate-to-liberal Republican like Giuliani, but without Giuliani's record of governing as a tough conservative, and without the ability to capture and dominate media attention that is Giuliani's strong suit...

...The level of D'Amato's political acumen these days can be judged by the fact that last year the candidate he most feared running against was not Schumer, but Mark Green, who came in third in the Democratic primary...

...In 1998, three-term Republican senator Al D'Amato was defeated in a humiliating landslide by Rep...

...He is a supporter of gay rights and believes in an unlimited right to abortion, even partial-birth abortion...

...And second, in the corpse of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed black man shot 19 times by four cops in the doorway of a Bronx tenement earlier this year...

...But the second is rapidly gaining purchase, thanks to some clever ideological politicking by left-wing Democrats—and an understandable, but foolishly blinding, hostility to Giuliani on the part of those Republicans in orbit around the state's Republican governor, George Pataki...

...That camp also believes that once the state's voters get to know Giuliani as they do, the voters will hate him just as much...

...More troubling for the GOP, Pataki won reelection by a margin far smaller than anybody anticipated—he pulled only 53 percent of the vote against a weak Democratic opponent and a Perot wannabe...

...And the turn in Giuliani's numbers gave his enemies in the Republican party an opening as well...

...The forces long arrayed against Giuliani swung into action after the Diallo shooting...

...Aside from his triumphant success at fighting crime, he has cut taxes, successfully fought to end the destructive open-admissions policy at the city's university system, sought to deregulate some of the city's rules governing the size of retail stores, and installed the most innovative welfare reformer in the country, Jason Turner, as head of the city's Human Resources Administration...