Taming New York City

NY Times:

It was a depressed and devastated place: a city shoulder-to-shoulder with welfare recipients, free-spending city officials and greedy lawyers. New York was, in the telling of Rudolph W. Giuliani, a haven of high taxes and high crime, crumbling buildings and filthy streets. It was governed by liberals and dominated by Democratic voters who did not agree with the ideas of Mr. Giuliani but who nonetheless twice elected him mayor.

This is Mr. Giuliani’s New York — his portrait of the city he inherited when he became mayor in 1994, presented to the nation as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination. His portrayal offers an insight into the decidedly complicated relationship Mr. Giuliani has with the city that has made him such a formidable contender for his party’s nomination.

Mr. Giuliani is at once running against New York City and embracing it. It is his foil and fodder, a laugh line and an applause line. It is the city he has tamed and the place where he stared down — as he tells appreciative Republicans to hearty applause — liberals, criminals, welfare recipients, big-spending City Council members and the editorial writers of The New York Times. At times, talking about the city where he has lived most of his 63 years, Mr. Giuliani sounds like he was a stranger in his own land.

“I got elected and re-elected honestly not because the people of New York City agreed with my ideas,” he told an appreciative audience at the York County Republican dinner in Rock Hill, S.C., on Thursday. “They didn’t. They agreed with my results. You agree with my ideas.”

“Gosh, there are more Republicans on this side of the room than there are in all of New York City,” Mr. Giuliani said brightly at a breakfast the next morning in Columbia, as he gestured to the right side of a dining room filled with builders and brokers. “So I am really comfortable here.”

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Mr. Giuliani’s New York is certainly not all bleak, particularly when he describes what it was like when he left office at the end of 2001. It is also, in his telling when he visits rural parts of the country like Iowa, a city not unlike small-town America. (He is referring to Staten Island.) In Florida, where Mr. Giuliani is looking for New York transplants to lift him to victory in the January primary, New York is the source of shared memories: Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Zabar’s delicatessen and the Yankees (well, maybe not this year).

“You know, one of the nice things about being New York mayor is that Yogi is a friend of mine,” he told a transplanted New Yorker in South Carolina, who stopped him for an autograph and to reminisce about the Yankees’ championship years.

But more than anything, Mr. Giuliani’s New York is the laboratory that proved the failure of Democratic Party policies, just as his role as a Republican mayor in helping to revive the city is a vindication, he argues, of the very conservative policies that Republicans assert are at stake in this election — personal responsibility, low taxes and the right balance of civil liberties and security. Again and again, he tells wide-eyed listeners of visiting London before he became mayor and being handed a brochure, that was being given to New York-bound Englanders by travel agents, that listed 10 tips to avoid being the victim of a crime.

“You know what the last tip was?” he asked. “‘Don’t make eye contact.’ Can you imagine going to a city and being told you shouldn’t look at anyone?”

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I think his best pitch is the failure of Democrat ideas that ruined New York. You can see those failures now in New Orleans, Newark and Baltimore and San Francisco. They are all places that could use new ideas and a sustained fight against corruption. The fact is that Democrat ideas fail in a lot of places, but people make the mistake of continuing to elect them. Rudy needs to make the case that we don't want the country to make the same mistake.