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The Republican Front-Runner
Whether or not that claim will be realized, Giuliani’s emergence as the Republican front-runner is one of the most improbable comebacks in recent American politics.Six years ago, Rudy Giuliani was finished with elective politics. His term was up as mayor, and he planned to run for the Senate. But after the double whammy of prostate cancer and another divorce, he scrapped his plans, and Hillary Clinton easily won New York’s open seat in 2000. Giuliani’s divorce was messy. It turned out he hadn’t actually divorced wife number two (Donna Hanover) before publicly taking up with wife number three (Judith Nathan). While New York’s feisty tabloids milked the story, it seemed a sad end to a spectacular career.
Giuliani had taken office in 1994, vowing boldly to make the city safe and confident after high-profile cases like the Central Park jogger rape and beating made national headlines. “The era of fear has had a long enough reign,” he proclaimed. Four years later, running for reelection, he touted the “New York miracle” that he and Police Commissioner William Bratton had achieved in the form of a greatly lowered crime rate. New York cops began doing everything from cleaning up graffiti to ticketing the city’s notorious “squeegee men” (windshield washers who would intimidate drivers in traffic tie-ups) to frisking young toughs whose overt crime might have been jaywalking but who often packed firearms, a felony in New York City.
Major crime declined 40 percent in Giuliani’s first term. But cutting crime wasn’t all he accomplished. A huge budget deficit was closed, the tax base was expanded, and New York stopped hemorrhaging jobs. Most of all, the mayor helped rekindle the city’s famous can-do spirit.
Giuliani’s greatest achievement, according to Manhattan Institute fellow Fred Siegel, was nothing less than “the restoration of upward mobility as the social norm in New York.” In his biography of Giuliani, The Prince of the City, Siegel states, “Giuliani’s predecessors spoke endlessly of what the city owed the poor but delivered instead rising rates of crime and welfare. Giuliani spoke not only of the rights of the poor but also of their obligations to society. New York’s poorest neighborhoods experienced the sharpest drop in crime and the biggest rises in income and property values. No other city has made comparable gains.”
Despite Giuliani’s successes, many New Yorkers were tired of his combative style, epitomized by routinely calling his critics jerks or questioning their sanity. “He performed well on September 11, but it had felt like an eight-year fistfight,” New Yorker writer Peter Boyer observed. “Giuliani had fought with teachers and with Yasir Arafat, with the Brooklyn Museum and with Fidel Castro, with squeegee men, tennis fans, street vendors, taxi drivers, his own police chief and, of course, his wife.”
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