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Razzle
Dazzle
A day after John McCain's April 8 appearance on "60 Minutes" in which the Arizona Senator confessed that he had "worse than waffled" about the flying of the Confederate flag in state capitols during the South Carolina Republican presidential primary in 2000, Mr. Giuliani was asked his view on the issue. According to the New York Times, he responded, "One of the great beauties of the kind of government we have, which is a national/federal government, is that we can make - on a broad range of issues - we can make different decisions in different parts of the country. We have different sensitivities, and at different times we are going to come to different decisions, and I think that is best left up to the states." Candor Tipped Nomination to Bush
That was Mr. McCain's initial position during the South Carolina primary, until, stricken by conscience, he called the Confederate flag an offensive symbol of the days of slavery and later, segregation, that therefore transcended the prerogatives of individual states. That candor, along with smear charges engineered by George Bush political guru Karl Rove that he was mentally unstable and had fathered an out-of-wedlock black child, helped cost Senator McCain the primary and provided the momentum swing that eventually elected Mr. Bush. Mr. Giuliani clearly decided he wasn't going to make that same mistake. His endorsement of states' rights is a continuation of his drift away from sentiments that he held as Mayor as he seeks to appeal to conservative Republicans. If anything, his position on the Confederate flag is less-egregious in that regard - since he wasn't contradicting a stance he had taken in the past - than his shift on gun control. The man who was the only Republican Mayor to join dozens of Democratic colleagues in suing the gun industry, and during his first year in office in 1994 was a key supporter of the Brady Bill restricting the sale of handguns and a ban on the sale of assault weapons, has allowed his position to, shall we say, evolve. Mr. Giuliani, who once excoriated southern states for lax laws that allowed thousands of guns bought in the region to make their way north for use in crimes across the city now contends that states, rather than the Federal Government, should decide to what extent they want to regulate sales. President Bush, playing to his base, during his 2004 re-election campaign allowed the assault weapons ban enacted under President Clinton to expire, and Mr. Giuliani is not advocating that it be reinstated. A longtime Rudy aide, Tony Carbonetti, told the Times a month ago that Mr. Giuliani's position on gun restrictions now was, "I had the right to express my opinion, but I can't impose my opinion. New York has their laws, and Florida has their laws." Former Mayor Ed Koch, an adversary turned ally turned adversary, said Mr. Giuliani's claim that he was merely doing his job as an advocate for New York during the 1990s and is now viewing gun issues with a national perspective doesn't ring true. 'He'll Play to the Crowd' "That, to me, is a sign of a guy who will say whatever the crowd wants," Mr. Koch remarked during an April 12 phone interview. When he hasn't been pandering to Republican audiences on regional touchstones, Mr. Giuliani has emphasized the leadership he displayed on 9/11 and how the lessons of that day have forged in him the vigilance that makes him the best-qualified candidate to keep America safe from future terrorism. It's the strongest card he has to play, and the one least likely to trip him up when his record as Mayor is closely scrutinized. The contempt that familiarity has earned Mr. Giuliani among many New Yorkers was what longtime fire union official Vinnie Bollon was referring to late last year when he said, "The rest of the country should know him the way we do." That assessment was borne out by two polls last week. One, conducted for the Los Angeles Times, showed Mr. Giuliani with a comfortable lead in the battle for the Republican nomination and a six-point edge over Hillary Clinton for President should they emerge as their parties' nominees. The other one, which was done for New York 1, showed Ms. Clinton defeating him by 14 points statewide, and with slightly more city residents rating him unfavorably than having a good opinion of the ex-Mayor. The discrepancy exists, according to Mr. Koch, because the rest of the nation has not yet gotten the full flavor of Rudy. "As he goes around the country and is covered more by the national media, it's going to be seen that he is a bad guy when it comes to running the country," the former three-term Mayor said. "I think the media nationally will be much tougher on him than the media in the city was - and they were pretty tough on him." For most Americans, Mr. Giuliani personifies national resoluteness under the weight of the tragedies of Sept. 11. They know little if anything about his imperious behavior as Mayor, including the pettiness that led him to refuse to meet with respected black officials including then-State Comptroller Carl McCall and Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields because of critical comments they made about his administration in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo by Street Crimes Unit cops eight years ago. Good, Bad and Ugly "He performed superbly on 9/11 - no one could have done it better," Mr. Koch said. "But the way he treated people ... what kind of person is that who only meets with people that he agrees with?" The Diallo shooting became a kind of referendum on Mr. Giuliani because the circumstances that produced it, including his decision to ignore the warning of the head of the SCU and triple its size - leading to lapses in training and supervision - were so emblematic of his approach to government and policing. What was more telling, in some ways - because it involved matters that reflected less directly on the Mayor - was his decision nearly a year prior to the Diallo shooting to take a report on improving policing issued by his own hand-picked panel and figuratively drop-kick it into the garbage. At the time Mr. Giuliani appointed the commission, the stationhouse torture of Abner Louima by a Brooklyn cop and the complicity of his colleagues at the 70th Precinct was the only possible obstacle to an easy re-election win for Mr. Giuliani. His curt dismissal of the panel's recommendations as unrealistic came three months into his second term, making it seem obvious that he had appointed former top NYPD officials to study the issues to neutralize the Louima case rather than for a serious look at departmental changes. Shares Trait With Imus Mr. Giuliani's mild response to the Don Imus controversy last week, essentially saying nothing more than that the radio host had made a mistake but that he would continue appearing on his show, was not surprising. If the ex-Mayor never stooped to the level of calling young black athletes "nappy-headed hos," he nonetheless engaged in similarly smug bullying. And Mr. Giuliani's transgressions involved cases where young minority men lost their lives, from castigating a woman whose teenage son had been killed by a cop at 3 a.m. for allowing him to be out that late, to releasing the sealed juvenile records of Patrick Dorismond after he was fatally shot in a confrontation foolishly instigated by an undercover cop. Ironically, those examples of Mr. Giuliani's flawed character figure to have less impact on how voters judge him than less-relevant but nonetheless revealing incidents in his personal life. The fact that the ex-Mayor has been married three times might cause problems for him among some voters. A more likely source of doubts based on what his personal life says about his character stems from the statements his son Andrew made last month about being estranged from Rudy and having a less-than-loving relationship with his wife Judi. Self-Blame Well-Placed Mr. Giuliani's response that the fault lay with him, not his wife, was a frank acknowledgment of reality rather than gallantry. The most caring of stepmothers would have a hard time winning over children who knew that she had been romantically involved with their father while he was still living with their mother. That didn't seem to occur to Mr. Giuliani at the time, any more than the thought that if he were planning to seek a divorce, announcing it at a press conference was not the most graceful way to proceed. But then, the feelings of his second wife and their two children seemed secondary to the fact that the New York Post on that morning carried a front-page headline in which State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno stated that for the sake of his U.S. Senate campaign, Mr. Giuliani had to clear the air about his marital status. There was no sense in antagonizing a political supporter like Mr. Bruno merely to avoid humiliating Donna Hanover Giuliani. Kissing Off Kerik Unless, of course, Mr. Giuliani had been thinking a bit further ahead about both his family and his political career. His tendency to do what satisfies his short-term appetites is a quality he shares with Bernie Kerik, although Rudy is far smarter and seems to have avoided the kind of jackpots that have marked Mr. Kerik's existence from the time that his nomination for Secretary of Homeland Security crashed into his past indiscretions. In the 28 months since, Mr. Giuliani's position on Mr. Kerik's friendship with reputed mob associates has shifted from not knowing about it but doubting it would have changed his mind about appointing him Police Commissioner, to admitting that he must have known because his Investigation Commissioner insists he told him, and believing that the appointment was a mistake. The ex-Mayor is usually so disinclined to concede he's erred that his recent remarks raised suspicions that there may be something worse in Mr. Kerik's past than has been hinted at by stories that Federal prosecutors will soon indict him. An unusually long run-up to the actual 2008 election, spurred by a combination of accelerated state primaries and a public and media so weary of Mr. Bush that there is heightened interest in who might replace him is probably working to Mr. Giuliani's disadvantage. The longer he is on the radar as the Republican front-runner, the more time there is for him to have to deal with a recounting of his past sins and the possibility that others will surface. Elastic Values It's hard to imagine him emerging with his party's nomination, or then being able to transform himself anew to capture enough Democratic votes to win the general election. During his appearance in Alabama last week, Mr. Giuliani proclaimed, "I'll set a course and stick with it. I will tell you what I believe." But his beliefs in areas like gun control have already proven to be as elastic as his moral values, expanding and contorting to fit his needs of the moment. As he sometimes did during his more difficult crises as Mayor, he evokes Raymond Chandler's line in "The Big Sleep" about the businessman/gangster Eddie Mars: "He's anything that looks good to him, anything with money pinned to it." Rudy Giuliani's professed passion for reinventing government has never burned as brightly as his lust for reinventing himself. | ||||||
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