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Taking On Hillary
Boyer could have added ferret owners to this litany. “There is something deranged about you,” Giuliani once told a caller to Hizzoner’s radio show who objected to the city’s ban on ferrets as pets. “The excessive concern you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist.”Giuliani says his behavior was a necessary tactic: “I was in an environment in which I had to change people’s minds. What had been done there wasn’t working. I had to be very provocative. You use the parts of your personality you have to use.”
Though the mayor’s exchanges with his adversaries could be humorous, his caustic style was a nagging reminder that when it came to the “New York miracle,” there was a troubling underside: In their zeal to clean up the Big Apple, Giuliani and his NYPD had too often run roughshod over civil liberties, especially in minority neighborhoods. It was one thing to reflexively back the cops even in the most shocking police shootings; it was another to blame the victim. Yet this is what Giuliani did on more than one occasion.
In May 1999, when Dantae Johnson, an unarmed 16-year-old boy, was shot and wounded by police who tried to question him, Giuliani and his top officials questioned why the youth’s family let him run around on the streets at midnight and cited a prior arrest to try to paint him as a bad kid.
When Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed security guard, was gunned down and killed the following March by an undercover narcotics officer, Giuliani cited his juvenile record, claiming that Dorismond wasn’t “an altar boy.” But Dorismond, a 26-year-old Haitian immigrant and father of two, had been an altar boy and had made something of himself in life.
In Giuliani’s first term, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima claimed that a cop who tortured him told him, “This is Giuliani time!’’ The quote turned out to be a fabrication, but the police brutality against Louima was quite real, which is why his claim struck a chord in New York’s black and Latino communities. The city paid more than $10 million to settle these cases, an issue that didn’t overly concern the mayor. If this was Giuliani’s blind spot, he’d had it a long time. As a U.S. Attorney, he was known for humiliating defendants, and he brought that authoritarian streak with him to city hall. His tough style might have been a permanent part of Rudy Giuliani’s political epitaph. But then those planes hit the World Trade Center.
“Rudy proved after 9/11 that he was more than a mayor. He was a leader. In the single worst moment of our collective memory, he was at his best. That overrides everything else,” says Frank Luntz, the strategist who helped fashion the GOP’s Contract with America. Today, Giuliani says he’s mellowed: “Going through prostate cancer as a personal issue and 9/11 as a public issue—these things mature you in a way. They give you a much greater perspective.” But will Republicans be able to live with a candidate who’s tough on crime and terrorism but soft on gay rights and abortion?
Grover Norquist, a prominent conservative, has told Religious Right leaders not to shun Giuliani over social issues. “He’d give you [conservative] judges,” Norquist told them. “He’d give you 95 percent of what you want, which is a lot better than 100 percent of what you don’t want,” a reference to Hillary Clinton. Giuliani keeps hammering on this theme himself. “I can take Democrat states from her,” he said recently. “Nobody else does that.”
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