READY FOR RUDY

Murdock, Deroy

New York NE JET PASSENGER NEVER WILL FORGET t h e evening of March 9, 2005. He remembers flying with Rudolph William Giuliani from Dallas, where "America's Mayor" earlier that day had...

...Former South Carolina GOP chairman Barry Wynn discussed these nettlesome issues at the June 13 launch of Solutions America in the posh Four Seasons restaurant...
...Back then," Philadelphia lawyer Joseph V. Del Raso jokes at a Giuliani fundraiser, "it would have been called "Mary Poppins," but she would have carried something other than an umbrella...
...Vagrants relieved themselves on trash-strewn sidewalks...
...Giuliani ran on this slogan in 1993, then immediately implemented it...
...He added: "The government shouldn't dictate that choice by making it a crime or making it illegal...
...9 In 1993, 1,946 New Yorkers were murdered, down from a peak of 2,262 in 1990, but still a spectacular level of carnage...
...Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without a father," Giuliani said in his January 14,1999 State of the City speech...
...As mayor, Giuliani repeatedly marched down Fifth Avenue with the Log Cabin Republicans in annual Gay Pride parades and counts gay people among his close friends...
...June unemployment was 5.1 percent, while the number of murders in 2005 was 504, down 72.25 percent from 1993...
...He sounded ReaganGotham's path from chaos to courtesy closely parallels Giuliani's journey from freshly minted mayor to globally lauded leader...
...And second.., the whole idea of quotas to me perpetuates discrimination...
...At the Minskoff Theater, Disney's The Lion King thrills morns, dads, and kids...
...Amid all this, a front-page New York Post headline pleaded: "DAVE DO SOMETHING...
...I don't understand why you would think that in an economy that's essentially a private economy, it makes more sense and is more efficient for the government to confiscate more of that money...
...The Washington Post dubbed him, "Winston Churchill in a Yankees cap...
...At last, Republicans could stop preemptively capitulating to, rather than confronting, Democrats...
...John McCain, at 25 points, despite claims that Giuliani is "too liberal" to play way off Broadway...
...Giuliani favors the U.S...
...Immigration and Terrorism Giuliani sees immigration and terrorism in tandem...
...Giuliani riled up the crowd, and twice called Dinkins's policies "bulls...
...Attorney Giuliani or24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 DEROY MURDOCK dering the handcuffing and arrests of Wall Street financiers for alleged securities violations...
...Pro-lifers point with alarm at Giuliani's April 5, 2001, address to the National Abortion Rights Action League's "Champions of Choice" luncheon in New York...
...One City...
...I am a very strong supporter of full and complete legal rights and protection for everyone, which includes opposing decisions based on sexual preference...
...Just as Winston Churchill fell into the wilderness during the 1930s, Giuliani was forced to sit on the sidelines as a feeling of hopelessness engulfed the city under the command of the hapless Mayor David Dinkins...
...To paraphrase Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York": If he can make it there, can he make it anywhere...
...He remembers flying with Rudolph William Giuliani from Dallas, where "America's Mayor" earlier that day had delivered a motivational address to 10,000 people...
...He put his mask over his face, picked the book back up, and kept reading Shakespeare...
...9 New York City's jobless rate was 10.2 percent...
...Central to this was "to reduce the size and cost of city government...
...While conservatives and libertarians may oppose Giuliani on some issues, they should remember that even Ronald Reagan occasionally found himself at loggerheads with his supporters (e.g., during his 1982 tax hike...
...Taxes "The thing that probably disturbs me the most when I read the New York Times editorials, they've kind of turned around the whole idea of cutting taxes, and they make tax increases morally courageous," Giuliani said April 25...
...He sold WNYC-AM, WNYC-FM, WNYC-TV, and Gotham's equity in the U.N...
...One Standard...
...Boondoggles like Alaska's $220 million "Bridge to Nowhere" would go nowhere with Giuliani in the saddle...
...B EYOND THAT, GIULIANI IS TOUGH AS HELL...
...While he signed domestic partnership legislation, that apparently is where he draws the line...
...Give people a way to earn citizenship in which they have to demonstrate facility with English, and they have jobs, and they're paying taxes, and they've put themselves in an entirely legal status...
...As a Republican who supports a woman's right As mayor, Giuliani repeatedly marched down Fifth Avenue with the Log Cabin Republicans in annual Gay Pride parades and counts gay people among his close friends...
...Giuliani pioneered the use of the mid-day, televised 'perp walk' for white-collar defendants who posed no threat to the community, and many of whom were never even charged with a crime," says Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz...
...A few hours after having breakfast with President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, Giuliani learned the news that shocked the nation: John Hinckley had shot the president and three others in Washington, D.C...
...He let the private Central Park Conservancy manage all 843 acres of Manhattan's beloved urban forest...
...He cites a September 1992 rally where some 10,000 cops angry over Dinkins' law-enforcement positions shouted "No Justice, No Police...
...W HY, THEN, DO SOME o n t h e right question Giuliani's appeal west of 12th Avenue and south of Staten Island...
...As he said in the June 16, 1994 Newsday: "If you give the Board of Education more money, you end up with something like the old Soviet Union...
...esque as mayor-elect when he said to balance the city budget, "we have to increase the number of privatesector jobs...
...Giuliani is a committed insomniac who basically served around the clock as mayor and, literally, took just a few days off, here and there...
...Rudy is starting to remind me of Winston Churchill," New York City Council member Ken Fisher of Brooklyn told the New York Observer in March of that year...
...As mayor, he relentlessly stared down common offenders and sliced the overall crime rate by 57 percent...
...One of them sounded rattled even a few days later, while recalling the incident...
...Giuliani worries law-enforcement officers will be so busy handling "a system that's already unenforceable" that they won't "focus on the people that we have to focus on who.., might come here to carry out terrorist acts or to sell drugs or to commit crimes...
...Giuliani's supporters praise him for many of the same qualities for which Churchill is lionized: courage, strong convictions, an indomitable will, and a "never surrender" attitude...
...He didn't just say that things were worse in Czechoslovakia...
...Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Virginia (AtlasUSA.org...
...Giuliani also spoke in very traditional terms about parental responsibility...
...borders and high-tech identification for immigrants...
...Family Affairs Minors in foster care fell from 47,509 in December 1993 to 28,700 in 2001...
...I understand it's courageous to run into a fire and take somebody out, but I can't figure out what's courageous about raising taxes...
...It'll be much harder for terrorists to hide in a situation like that...
...A large share of this decrease came from those who fraudulently collectedbenefits and simplyvanishedwhen Giuliani i insisted on fingerprinting them...
...Historian Fred Siegel's indispensable analysis of Giuliani's mayoralty, The Prince of the City, describes the holistic dysfunction that greeted Giuliani...
...He is America's most successful conservative resilience on that day...
...En route to New York City, Giuliani perused a volume of Elizabethan literature he had purchased for his daughter, Caroline...
...Bureaucracy While hiring 12 percent more cops and 12.8 percent more teachers, Giuliani sliced municipal manpower elsewhere by 17.2 percent, from 117,494 workers in 1993 to 97,338 in 2001...
...Nominations for the 2007 Prize may be submitted on the Application Form at www.civilcourageprize.org 5EPTEMBE~ 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25...
...If you agree with me on i2 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist...
...The cabin started to depressurize...
...Giuliani proudly points to the local hotel tax, which he cut in 1995 from 6 percent to 5. Consequently, that tax's revenues soared from $135 million in FY 1995 to $239 million in FY 2001...
...History has made Churchill a conservative icon, even though when he was a Liberal member of Parliament during a budget crisis in 1909, he supported increasing taxes on the rich to help fund social programs...
...Today, New York City thrives...
...The pilot nose-dived the plane from 38,000 feet to a safer 9,000 feet...
...The answer will determine whether Giuliani's last day as mayor was the end of his political career--or, merely, the end of the beginning...
...In the five years since that fateful day, Giuliani has consistently cited Churchill's leadership to demonstrate the need to be vigilant in the fight against terrorism, most prominently in his 2004 speech to the Republican National Convention...
...He cut or eliminated 23 levies totaling $8 billion...
...It was a brutal way to treat people who were, after all, innocent until proven guilty-a combination of demagoguery and prosecutorial abuse that does not recommend him for an office whose executive powers have been vastly enhanced under Bush...
...What did Giuliani do...
...The image of an ash-covered Giuliani, defiantly walking through the rubble of downtown New York, became a symbol of the nation's 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 DEROY MURDOCK change dramatically public education in this country is to go to a choice system and break up the monopoly...
...The perfect should not be the enemy of the exceptional...
...A dozen years ago, it was a gritty, dangerous place, brimming with litter, vagrants, and pornography shops...
...A young hoodlum named Lemriek Nelson fatally stabbed Australian rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum as a black mob yelled, "Get the Jew...
...Do Giuliani's policies help or hinder his political future...
...In a virtuous cycle, those trends have improved under Giuliani's successor, Republican Michael Bloomberg...
...p OLICIES ASIDE, Eric Fettman, an editorialist with the generally pro-Giuliani New York Post, questions Giuliani's temperament...
...Giuliani also demanded accountability among municipal employees, starting with him...
...He understands that culture, more than politics, determines a community's success, and he has devised policies to drive cultural change in a conservative direction...
...It was a comforting thought,' In his book, Leadership, Giuliani wrote that when he went back home later that night, he read from Roy Jenkins' biography of Churchill until 4:30 in the morning specificallythe chapters about the Battle of Britain...
...Photo courtesy of the Ronold Reogon Presidentiol Librory...
...More than any one single accomplishment, he proved that New York City was, in fact, governable...
...T O GAUGE GIULIANI'S SUCCESS AS MAYOR, and assess the skills he might muster as president, stroll for a moment through the junkyard he inherited when he entered City Hall on January i, 1994...
...He also prosecuted corrupt congressmen Mario Biaggi and Bert Podell, and Bronx political boss Stanley Friedman...
...Both men have been lambasted for being stubborn, short-tempered, and egomaniacal...
...It does not include gay marriage as part of that definition...
...On February 23, 1997, on the Empire State Building's 102nd-floor Observation Deck, Palestinian Ali Hassan Abu Kamal fatally shot a tourist, wounded six others, and then killed himself...
...When he emerged from his own wilderness years and won a close rematch against Dinkins in 1993, Giuliani went to work transforming the city...
...Gallup found in June that 29 percent of registered Republicans surveyed favored him over Arizona Sen...
...Not to be discouraged, mayorelect Giuliani pointed out that "Winston Churchill didn't walk out in the middle of the Battle of Britain and say, "You know, those bombs may really win out in the long run and we may lose to the Nazi.~.'" During his two terms as mayor, Giuliani gained a reputation for cutting crime, fighting corruption, slashing welfare rolls, and standing up to the likes of the ACLU and AI Sharpton...
...According to Giuliani's book, Leadership, City Hall placed 151,376 welfare beneficiaries in private jobs in fiscal 2001, a 16-fold increase over 1993's 9,215 assignments under Dinkins...
...At yet another Manhattan Institute event, Giuliani's particularly passionate remarks on education drew strong applause from his June 13 Princeton Club audience...
...While abortion remains far more widespread in Gotham than across America (2001's U.S...
...The abortion ratio dropped from 890 terminations per 1,000 live births in 1993 to 767 in 2001...
...In speeches and interviews during the early 1990s, Giuliani evoked Churchill in his critique of Mayor Dinkins...
...On issue after issue, conservatives should hope what is past will be prologue...
...9 In August 1991, an anti- Semitic pogrom erupted in Crown Heights, Brooklyn...
...As Giuliani has said, "I don't think there's anybody much worse than a public officialwho sells his office, except maybe for a murderer...
...I know many people argue that keeping and bearing arms is a federally guaranteed right as stated in the Second Amendment of the Constitution," Giuliani told the Citizens Crime Commission that March 6. "But even in the Second Amendment, it refers to firearms in the context of a well regulated militia, and well regulated is what we're trying to accomplish...
...SEPTEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 23 READY FOR RUDY currently in office," columnist George Will wrote in October 1998...
...During his first month as mayor, Giuliani scrapped the city's 20 percent set-asides for minority- and female-owned contractors, and a 10 percent price premium that such companies could charge above the bids of white, male competitors...
...This effort was led by Nicholas Scoppetta--a one-time Justice Department colleague of Giuliani's and current FDNY commissioner--himself a former foster child...
...The real issue in South Carolina is the NIIA...
...As far back as his unsuccessful 1989 mayoral bid, Giuliani told Newsday that he grew up in a Catholic "traditional family...
...He wants tighter U.S...
...Still, Giuliani scrapped tenure for principals and dumped social promotion, which matriculated pupils even when they could not perform grade-level work...
...Giuliani had his own weekly call-in radio program and near-daily press conferences...
...Could he become the Great Right Hope in 2008...
...Homicides had plummeted 65 percent, mainly in once-crime-infested black and Hispanic neighborhoods...
...Asked once what he had done for minorities, Giuliani responded: "They are alive, how about we start with that...
...He continued: "My definition of family is what it is...
...Plaza Hotel...
...I took strength from how he handled those dark hours with endless optimism," hewrote...
...Nonetheless, despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Giuliani opposes gay marriage...
...So, I did away with it...
...If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me," former Gotham Mayor Ed Koch said...
...Giuliani was speaking that day to the Manhattan Institute, an influential think tank well regarded by conservatives and libertarians alike...
...Senate's proposal...
...Some 1.32 million New Yorkers, one of six, were on welfare...
...Financial guru Felix Rohatyn complained, "virtually all human activities are taxed to the hilt...
...Unemployment one month after 9/11 stood at 6.3 percent...
...It now teems with tourists, restaurants, concert venues, broadcast studios for ABC and MTV, and the NASDAQ market site...
...Giuliani's views on guns reflect the fact that criminals killed almost 2,000 New Yorkers the year before he arrived, most of them in shootings...
...There was not much Churchill could do to stop the bombs from falling," Giuliani noted in 1990, "but he talked about making sacrifices for the future...
...Some were exonerated...
...Researcher Marco DeSena contributed to this profile...
...Oxygen masks popped out and dangled from the ceiling above the heads of horrified travelers...
...Giuliani's new PAC raised $2 million that night, amid the gurgling pool and illuminated orchids that festooned the landmark midtown Manhattan eatery...
...As Giuliani contemplates a run for the White House, he may once again look to Churchill, who oscillated between being a conservative and aliberal throughout his political career...
...But Giuliani likely will need all of his persuasive skills to comfort them on this issue...
...Skeptics also accuse Giuliani of insulating himself among an unquestioningly loyal "Band of Brothers...
...Giuliani credits the organization and its quarterly magazine, City Jourhal, with inspiring many of his reforms...
...Public Assistance Two years before President Clinton signed federal welfare reform, Giuliani started reducing Gotham's dole from 1,112,490 recipients in 1993 to 462,595 in 2001, a 58.4-percent cut, to 1966 levels...
...New York City was not destined to be a cesspool of crime, filth, and corruption, he said...
...Repackaging" might impress stalwart conservatives, as Barry Wynn suggests...
...He argues against what he calls the House of Representatives' "punitive approach...
...Remember, I was dealing with a city that had about a $3 billion deficit at the time...
...Giuliani's national appeal has kept him at or near the top of the presidential-preference heap...
...He recently edited a book for the Manhattan Institute...
...Street battles raged for days as Democratic Mayor David Dinkins failed to deploy cops...
...Amazingly enough, Reader's Digest in June dubbed once-abrasive New York the world's politest city, a notch above placid, fastidious Zurich...
...abortion ratio was 246 per 1,000), its incidence fell during Giuliani's tenure, as it simultaneously did throughout America...
...Theodore Roosevelt, who met a young Churchill during his 1900 lecture tour in the United States, later wrote that Churchill displayed "an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety...
...As a former prosecutor who had never held elective office, he was given little chance of succeeding where, over the course of decades, a parade of New York City mayors had failed...
...SEPTEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 READY FOR RUDY Crime and Quality of Life Anyone who thinks Giuliani is a liberal should walk through Times Square...
...Can American conservatives similarly forgive Giuliani for his liberal social views...
...Giuliani regularly materialized at fires, building collapses, and other emergencies at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning...
...So, I guess if 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 DEROY MURDOCK you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, a lot better than the City of New York, the United States Congress, the Social Welfare Agency, and Administration for Children Services, I guess the social program would be called fatherhood...
...to choose, it is particularly an honor to be here...
...Speaker Peter Vallone, a moderate Democrat from Queens, was Giuliani's frequent ally...
...But by 2000, the media narrative went, New Yorkers had grown weary of the polarization of the Giuliani era...
...It's impossible to imagine him leaving his veto pen t holstered for five and a half years, as did President Bush...
...The problem was poor leadership...
...In an era of a War on Terrorism" he said April 25, "how do we create more security...
...Howwe could possibly pay 10 percent more for anything seemed incomprehensible to me...
...Giuliani's tax record matches his rhetoric...
...While only 2,312 children were adopted in Gotham in 1994, cumulative adoptions swelled to 27,949 between then and 2001...
...Americans want a forceful leader in the White House," Fettman wrote March 22, "but not one who looks like he's coming unglued in public...
...The Trustees of the Northcote Parkinson Fund John Train, Chairman C o n g r a t u l a t e The 2006 C i v i l Courage Prize Honoree Rafael Marques de Morais For steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk during and since the civil war in Angola, and for his support of a humane society...
...Giuliani worked, as well, with John Cardinal O'Connor and Rabbi Morris Sherer in 1996 to make available to underachieving public-school students as many as 2,000 privately funded seats in Catholic and Jewish parochial schools...
...Nonetheless, despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Giuliani opposes gay marriage...
...SEPTEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 READY FOR RUDY Giuliani addressed nearly every facet of the pandemonium that reigned from the Bronx to the Battery...
...Others point to then-U.S...
...And, on September 11, he literally rose from the rubble, covered in ash, and steadily reassured the world that New York City was on the mend just moments after it endured its worst blow since its founding in 1625...
...While a U.S...
...Is leadership enough...
...Such steadfastness may be what Americans find most appealing about Rudy Giuliani...
...Gay rights: People will disagree, but support him...
...Asked after September 11 if he would hike taxes, Giuliani was refreshingly blunt, calling that "a dumb, stupid, idiotic, and moronic thing to do...
...He slashed municipal tax revenues' share of personal income by 18.9 percent and the top local income-tax rate by 21 percent...
...Thus, his reform potential was limited...
...The previous four years, Gotham lost 235 jobs--every day...
...But at the same time, Giuliani's detractors criticize the former mayor in much the same way that Churchill was criticized...
...Everyone down there is a hunter...
...His fiscal 1995 budget decreased outlays by 1.6 percent, while his post-9/lI fiscal 2002 plan lowered appropriations by 2.6 percent...
...Privatization Giuliani shrank the 33,000-unit portfolio of cityowned apartments by 69.8 percent...
...Giuliani never lassoed the then-independent Board of Education (though Bloomberg has...
...Giuliani, who declined six weeks of repeated requests to speak with TAS, did not respond to these criticisms...
...Families and individual residents now occupy those private homes...
...As a newly appointed associate attorney general, America's youngest ever, Giuliani methodically had Hinckley transferred from local police custody into federal hands that afternoon, then supervised his arraignment in federal court that night...
...Gotham's path from chaos to courtesy closely parallels Giuliani's journey from freshly minted mayor to globally lauded leader...
...Abortion: People will disagree, but support him," Wynn said, standing among some 300 guests...
...It has exactlythe opposite effect on people who support quotas think it would have...
...He'll have to repackage his position just a bit on that one...
...Giuliani, who considers himself a Reaganite, did so largely by applying conservative principles of tax reduction, fiscal responsibility, privatization, law and order, and colorblindness...
...attorney in New York, Giuliani serenely confronted and convicted Joe Bonanno and other Mafiosi...
...Congress must do more to prevent a tragedy like the one that happened at the Empire State Building from ever happening again...
...The city is visibly cleaner and more robust...
...Philip Klein is a reporter for The American Spectator...
...Social pathologies fueled disorder and lawlessness...
...The city shouldn't be paying 10 percent more...
...Even with police and pedagogues, the full-time city-funded workforce fell from 222, 286 employees to 215,891--a 2.87 percent overall reduction...
...While prominent Republicans can give more conservative speeches than Giuliani, one would have to reach back to Ronald Reagan for a leader who has implemented more policies dear to the right...
...How did he do it...
...When he later recounted the day for/~'me magazine, which named him 20ors "Person of the Year" Giuliani said, "I started thinking about Churchill, started thinking that we're going to have to rebuild the spirit ofthe city, and what better example than Churchill and the people of London duringthe Blitz in 1940, who had to keep up their spirit during this sustained bombing...
...Churchill, in his day, was also accused of being a publicity hound...
...Education Giuliani pulls no punches on schools, either...
...Ironically, Giuliani restrained spending with never more than six Republicans in the 51-seat City Council...
...At the Justice Department, where several top City Hall aides served, these advisors were nicknamed "Yesrudys...
...He was a great wartime prime minister for New York City but that kind of bulldog behavior comes across in peacetime New York as threatening...
...Enforced collections grew 128 percent from $209 million in 1994 to $477 million in 2001...
...Yet, according to official statistics, the number of abortions performed in New York City fell from 110,4,35 in 1993 to 91,792 in 2001...
...Giuliani's administrative habits should satisfy conservatives who want a muscular advocate of their philosophy to employ it sedulously...
...Miles above Pennsylvania, an aircraft door-seal suddenly cracked...
...Giuliani has been assailed as publicitycrazed ever since his days as prosecutor, when he would parade indicted men before cameras in socalled "perp walks...
...He also launched a Charter School Fund and openly advocated vouchers, traveling to Milwaukee in May 2001 to embrace its schoolchoice successes...
...After studying his mayoral record, rightists who remain hesitant about Rudy Giuliani should consider the words of one of his City Hall predecessors...
...Spending Giuliani's expenditure growth averaged 2.9 percent annually, while local inflation between January 1994 and December 2001 averaged 3.6 percent...
...Projects sometimes were subdivided to qualify newer, less-capitalized bidders...
...Instead, Giuliani offered all contractors instruction on how to prepare more competitive applications...
...Four days earlier, Giuliani told listeners on WINS-AM: "The United States Congress needs to pass uniform licensing for everyone carrying a gun...
...Conservatives weary of camera-shy GOP politicians who barely can weave together three sentences should relish the prospect of Giuliani clearly and candidly promoting his ideas and initiatives...
...I have no idea what is courageous about raising taxes...
...A plaque on his City Hall desk read: "I'm responsible...
...Little did Fisher know that on September 11, 2001, New York would become a different type of war zone, and that Giuliani's "bulldog behavior" would be precisely what the city, and the country, needed...
...As Giuliani explained at a December 3,1997 Manhattan Institute forum: I, number one, thought that was very bad public policy...
...Next door, at the Amsterdam Theater, Mary Poppins opens this fall...
...Ronald Reagan welcomes Associate Attorney General-designate Rudolph W, Giuliani to the Oval Office on the morning of March 30, 1981, just hours before John Hinckley shot the president...
...The only thing that I believe is going to I N THE 1989 New York City mayoral election Rudy Giuliani fared better than any Republican candidate had in nearly 25 years, but he lost by less than 50,000 votes, in one of the closest races in the city's history...
...How did he do it...
...one area that I would emphasize.., is choice and vouchers," Giuliani said, warmly embracing the "W" word...
...Mental patients roamed the streets, and occasionally pushed commuters onto subway tracks...
...Giuliani pressured deadbeat dads (and moms) to honor their child-support obligations...
...Giuliani also renamed welfare offices "Job Centers...

Vol. 39 • September 2006 • No. 7


 
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