The Liberal Candidate

Is Rudy Giuliani a new Barry Goldwater or a new Bobby Kennedy?

David Weigel from the December 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Giuliani’s DOJ job was a high-profile position, and it allowed him to do a lot. But when the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York resigned in 1983, Giuliani offered to take the less prestigious, lower-salary job.

It was a good call: Giuliani was born for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He was a low-wattage star in the D.C. political press, but the move to New York offered the chance of real media stardom. And instead of running interference for the Reagan administration, Giuliani would be able to apply the law as he liked. In a 1984 interview on PBS he spelled out his philosophy by defending another tough crime bill that had just worked its way through Congress. “I consider myself a very firm believer in due process, and a libertarian in that sense,” Giuliani said. “But I think we became almost stupid in our excessiveness in the way in which we were protecting, overprotecting the rights of people, to the disadvantage of other people.”

Giuliani’s office was prosecuting the old Bobby Kennedy foes, of course—the crooked union bosses, the mafia. In 1986 Giuliani donned a leather Hell’s Angels vest and went with Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.), similarly “disguised,” to buy crack on West 160th Street. It was pure theater, with photos that wouldn’t be matched in their sublime weirdness until Mayor Giuliani dressed in drag and smooched Donald Trump in 2000. But Giuliani was learning more and more about spectacle. And he was thinking big about the intersection of his power in the media and his power in the courts. Giuliani was intimately familiar with the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, passed in 1970, which made it easier for prosecutors to nail mobsters if they’d committed certain crimes twice within 10 years. He was constantly getting tips about Wall Street fraud, and he knew how slippery wealthy traders could be when they faced prosecution. But what if they were vulnerable to RICO charges?

Giuliani’s office was relentless, charging suspects with multiple counts of crimes, shaking down minor traders to get what he wanted from the big players: Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken. If his crusade resembled the way cops went after mobsters, that was intentional. Feds appeared at the offices of indicted traders to put them in handcuffs, marching them to court as their colleagues gawked. “I’m not in this job to do the safe thing,” Giuliani said in 1986. “If you never try to accomplish anything, you never fail. I’d rather fail.”

That was the approach he took with Richard Wigton, a 57-year-old arbitrageur at Kidder, Peabody & Company who was arrested on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and whose indictment was representative in both style and outcome. Wigton was charged with bilking clients, and three months later the charges were dropped. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office kept asking me if I’d make a deal,” says Stanley Arkin, Wigton’s attorney. “I told them I never would: They had no evidence. It was a ruthless act.”

The insider trading arrests were sensational, but they were for the most part directed against people who were tangentially related to any crimes. Some targets submitted: In December 1988, Drexel Burnham, the big fish of the insider trading scandals, settled for $650 million to avoid RICO charges. (To this day, lawyers debate whether the firm would have actually been found guilty.) But during the next few years dozens of the indicted traders were acquitted or freed when the government dropped charges against them. By then Giuliani had moved on: He was a candidate for mayor.

After Giuliani left the U.S. Attorney’s Office, The New York Times editorialized that “New Yorkers have seen enough to hope that one day he’ll return to public service.” The first Marist Institute poll on the 1989 mayoral race showed Giuliani leading the incumbent, Ed Koch—past his prime but gunning for a fourth term—by 27 points. The former U.S. attorney’s appeal cut across party lines, and he ran as a good-government liberal—a cleaner, tougher, more effective version of Koch. “You may know me by the reputation I’ve earned fighting for justice,” Giuliani thundered in a stump speech, “but my commitment to justice goes beyond the courtroom. My commitment goes to the social justice we all want for the less fortunate and for each other. A prosecutor cannot ease crushing poverty or end homelessness or treat drug addicts or help people with AIDS. But a mayor can. And a mayor must.”

It was a perfect anti-Koch message; unfortunately, Koch was skunked in the Democratic primary by the black Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins. Giuliani’s team wasn’t quite ready to win a white-on-black, reformer-on-reformer campaign, and Dinkins came out on top in the nasty general election, winning by four points. During the next four years Giuliani marinated in urban policy. He talked with scholars from the neoconservative Manhattan Institute and pored over its magazine, City Journal, especially its Spring 1992 issue on “the quality of urban life.” In April 1993 Giuliani lauded “Defining Deviancy Down,” Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the slow moral and social suicide of the American city. The rematch campaign against Dinkins was streamlined, hard-edged, a direct challenge to what voters had increasingly come to see as Dinkins’ muddled, failed, racially fraught liberalism. Giuliani reversed the 1989 margin and won.

The Mayor
During the campaign Giuliani had argued with his adviser Larry Kudlow (now the cable news guru of supply-side economics) about when to cut taxes. Kudlow wanted the new mayor to pass immediate, sweeping cuts. Giuliani argued that he needed to “establish credibility” on crime before he could touch taxes. And crime was already starting to drop when the new mayor entered Gracie Mansion.

One reason: Ray Kelly, David Dinkins’ police commissioner (and the current holder of the position, appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002). From the start of Dinkins’ term through Giuliani’s inauguration, burglary fell nearly 18 percent, car theft fell nearly 24 percent, and murder—the measure of the city’s health that prompted the most concern—fell by 14 percent. Kelly had studied under the urban policy academic and consultant George Kelling, co-author with the neoconservative sociologist James Q. Wilson of the 1982 Atlantic Monthly article “Broken Windows,” which argued that ignoring relatively small crimes such as car radio theft leads to higher rates of serious crimes such as random murders.

“The first impact you saw from implementing ‘broken windows’ was in the subway,” Kelling says. “In 1989 the subways were purgatory. Homeless people slept in the tunnels. There was graffiti all over the cars. Kelly applied ‘broken windows’ and cleaned up the subways, and right away you could see the impact. By 1993 they were under control.”

Giuliani understood the theory far better than Dinkins. During the campaign he had promised to rid the city of “squeegee men”—derelicts, many of them mentally ill, who used dirty rags to “clean” the windows of cars stopped at red lights or in traffic and then demanded payment. During the mayoral campaign Giuliani had called the car cleaners a “menace” and pledged to use police power to oust them, while Dinkins called them a distraction. “Killers and rapists are a city’s real public enemies,” he said, “not squeegee pests and homeless mothers.”

Mayor Giuliani and his new police commissioner, Boston-trained William Bratton, ordered the arrest of squeegee men on charges of jaywalking. Some of the perpetrators were locked up, and some abandoned their squeegees for fear of getting arrested. By summer all of the squeegee men—there were just 75 of them, it turned out —were gone.

Bratton and the mayor basked in the credit for the squeegee solution; ACLU types sounded shrill when they attacked the “scapegoating” of the squeegee men. Ray Kelly had plotted the strategy for taking down the squeegee bunch, so Giuliani wasn’t marching into the unknown, but George Kelling doesn’t deny the Republican mayor credit for what happened. “Rudy had the political courage to take ideas that were coming to be relatively popular and take political hurt for supporting them,” he says. Giuliani knew what Dinkins didn’t know: how to stretch the laws like a trapeze net, catching criminals and nuisances who had thought themselves invulnerable.

Early on Giuliani and Bratton launched a program of comprehensive statistics, or CompStat, in which law enforcement officials met daily to pore over crime numbers and identify what was working, what wasn’t, where the police presence needed to increase, and where it could be reduced. It was hands-on, and it worked; Giuliani evangelized the program to other cities and cloned it in the corrections system.

Comments

|11.14.07 @ 6:09PM|#

I have nothing of interest to offer but just wanted to say that was a very good piece, David.

|11.14.07 @ 6:14PM|#

"Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority."

That says it all. This man must not become our next president, no way, no how, under any circumstances.

|11.14.07 @ 6:15PM|#

I think it was a good piece, but I'm not sure why Weigel called him the liberal candidate. The article makes it clear Giuliani has become a neoconservative of sorts. And his fondness for Bobby Kennedy aside, he doesn't seem to support the causes that most strongly motivate contemporary liberals: abortion rights (he would appoint another Scalia, not another Ginsberg), universal health care, and a commitment to diversity.

Maybe "The Prosecutorial Candidate" would have been a better title?

|11.14.07 @ 6:15PM|#

I mean, Orwellian in its madness. Fucking Orwellian.

|11.14.07 @ 6:56PM|#

Guliani, god willing, will not win the presidency.

And Ashish, neoconservatives are liberals who got kicked out of the sandbox for smashing up everyone elses toys. Look how many ex-communists, socialists are in the neoconservative ranks and how callously they pursue power as an ends. Nobody, anywhere, should aspire to be a neoconservative.

Ska|11.14.07 @ 7:16PM|#

Yeah, JK, that comment is really scary. Hopefully there are only a handful of people who agree with it. Because we all know there are people who do.

|11.14.07 @ 7:19PM|#

If, as the Las Vegas odds makers expect, it comes down to Hillary vs. Rudy, I'm voting for Clinton, part two. I despise the woman.

You'll notice that Ron Paul is off the board.

duster|11.14.07 @ 7:45PM|#

Bobby Kennedy spoke out agaist drug prohibition, in pointing out that it benefitted organized crime and made criminals out of ordinary citizens. I wish Rudy were a little more like him in that way, but it doesn't jibe with his 'Freedom = Submission' equation. More than a handful of people agree with that, and they're the people politicians pretend to care about most.

CKG|11.14.07 @ 8:57PM|#

This is going to be very difficult, but I think if it comes down to Hillary versus Rudy, I'll have to back Hillary too. Neither give a damn about freedom, and so with either one, we'll have some dark years ahead. But at least Hillary is calculating enough that she won't fuck up. Rudy is so committed to his vision of the "War on Terror" as this era's Cold War, that he will never give up, even if the Middle East winds up becoming a melted-down puddle of radioactivity. Rudy will keep on fighting at all costs. Even despite this, there is a little part of me that still sort of likes him. Oddly enough. Not enough for me to actually vote for him, but just a bit.

Andrew|11.14.07 @ 9:01PM|#

Above all, great article. As someone who worked in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I can tell you this: Things changed under Giuliani, generally for the better.

There is an autocratic side, yes. But then, this trait was perfect in NYC, long-called the "ungovernable city." You needed a butt-kicked like Rudy G. to whip it into shape. (And by "shape," I mean basic things like the ability to walk down a street at night with a reasonable assumption that you will NOT be mugged, harrassed, swindled etc.).

The question then before the house is: Can a great mayor make a great President?

M|11.14.07 @ 9:51PM|#

This man must not become our next president, no way, no how, under any circumstances.

No there's a seditious, and soon-to-be actionable, sentiment!

/snark

BakedPenguin|11.14.07 @ 10:51PM|#

...there is a little part of me that still sort of likes him. ...Not enough for me to actually vote for him, but just a bit.

There's a part of me that likes him, too. Not enough for me to vote for him, but enough to brake if he were ever to step in front of my car.

Of course, I like my car, too.

BakedPenguin|11.14.07 @ 11:29PM|#

Argh. That should have been "...I like my car, too, which is a good reason to brake."

Someone Who Doesn\'t Want to L|11.14.07 @ 11:31PM|#

I want to post this Giuliani quote ("Freedom is...") on my Facebook page (I know, I'm a lame-o; I'm on Facebook), but I'm worried that people wouldn't understand that it was meant ironically.

It would be up there with such greats as:

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

- Mel Brooks

"People should not be afraid of their government; governments should be afraid of their people"

-Alan Moore

and the all-time classic:

"There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976."

-Kinky Friedman

(Thank you Reason, for introducing me to the last one!)

Kolohe|11.15.07 @ 12:29AM|#

Benito Mussolini in a coat and tie.

oncogenesis|11.15.07 @ 2:35AM|#

No, Kolohe. Grandpa Munster channeling Benito Mussolini.

|11.15.07 @ 7:49AM|#

Benito Mussolini in a coat and tie.

Given Rudy's well-known penchant for drag, could we be looking at an election where both our candidates are "Hugo Chavez in a pantsuit"?

Broomstick Hilda|11.15.07 @ 9:38AM|#

I mean basic things like the ability to walk down a street at night with a reasonable assumption that you will NOT be mugged, harrassed, swindled etc.).

Things didn't change one bit. The mugging, hassling, and swindling was just done by the police instead of private citizens.

Episiarch|11.15.07 @ 9:50AM|#

Why would anyone vote for either Hillary or Rudy? Their differences are miniscule (unless you are a party partisan who wants your particular authoritarian in charge), and voting for one over the other is a tacit endorsement of that person. Better to not vote at all and hope the turnout is so low that it sends a message.

|11.15.07 @ 9:53AM|#

Heres pretty much where I stand-

Hillary Vs Rudy, I vote for the LP nutjob.

Hillary Vs Romney, I vote for Romney.

Hillary Vs Thompson, I vote for Thompson.

Hillary Vs McCain, again the LP nutjob.

AWIK DUNDER(head)OOOOO|11.15.07 @ 10:26AM|#

"Why would anyone vote for either Hillary or Rudy? Their differences are miniscule"

WHY YOU SISSY FAKE LIBERTARIAN CRAP ... MAN. GHOULIANI STANDS FOR STANDING UP AGAINST THE STANCES OF ISLAMOFACISM. 9/11 9/11 9/11. HILLARY SITS AND TAKES IT.

RUDY IS A TROO LIBERTARIAN. YOU ARE NOT. AND THAT MEANS YOU ARE... YOU ARE... YOU ARE....

A SILLY ASS FACE!!!!!!!

SO THERE.

crw|11.15.07 @ 12:30PM|#

Actually, in Hillary vs. Rudy, I'd hold my nose and vote Rudy. I'd rather have a power mad douche and divided government than a power mad douche and single party rule. Remember, a vote for Shrillary is a vote for letting the Dems do any damn thing they please.

|11.15.07 @ 2:13PM|#

Actually, in Hillary vs. Rudy, I'd hold my nose and vote Rudy. I'd rather have a power mad douche and divided government than a power mad douche and single party rule.

That's a pretty important thing to consider. Of course, there's always the expatriate option.

|11.17.07 @ 12:55AM|#

Rudy, whatever his faults, it as close to perfect a Republican candidate as we are ever likely to get. He is strong on national defense, tough on welfare, tough on crime, and liberal in the classical sense on economic matters. He's moderate on social issues and conservative on everything else. So are the majority of the American people.

Not only that he's a proven leader. He took New York, a crime-ridden socialist basket case and made it again into the world capital it once was. His leadership after 9-11 was magnificent.

Libertarians and conservatives should unite behind the best hope for defeating the socialist-Islamo-fascist coalition that dominates the Democratic Party today.

|11.17.07 @ 8:05AM|#

The impracticality of some many libertarians never ceases to amaze me. Guliani is certainly no prize from our perspective, but he is surely better than any of the statist Democrat alternatives. Faced with the poor choice of Guliani vs. any leftist Democrat, the rational libertarian should support the lesser of two evils. One party rule by statist Democrats for even four years could put this country on a long term collectivist path that would take decades at best to reverse.

McKinley|11.25.07 @ 3:10PM|#

"Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority." Followed shortly by "...how to stretch the laws like a trapeze net, catching criminals and nuisances who had thought themselves invulnerable." then followed by "The mayor directed the Metropolitan Transit Authority to strip the ads." obviosly a complete contempt for law other then his own. Hillary vs. Rudy: Nanny state vs. Police state.