Dershowitz, now there’s a guy who saddens me tremendously. I used to admire him, his books were among my favorites. Now I can’t stand him.
This is the exact same divisive prick who was mayor of NYC. He didn’t change. He was lucky on crime (the downward trend started a few years before he was elected) much the same way Clinton got lucky with the economy.
Bloomberg was a thousand times better than Giuliani.
He went after the Italian Mafia, sure, but not the Russian Mafia, which is… interesting, given his long-term ties to Russia.
This verges on the post hoc, ergo propter hoc, given the number of cities he wasn’t mayor of which became safer over the same period.
Lawyers are bound to professional canons, which includes not lying or otherwise engaging in malfesance. They aren’t simply mouthpieces, they’re agents of the court, after all.
I think he was “America’s Mayor” for 9 to 11 weeks, or maybe just 9 to 11 days.
It is said that in '08, Giuliani’s presidential primary strategy was to hold out on campaigning until Florida came along, counting on all the NY-area retirees who lived in Florida… problem was, precisely, all the NY-area retirees who lived in Florida, and who were done with him.
From all I hear on it, **RitterSport **has the best take on it, including the idea that, as happened to many people out there, 9/11 “broke” something in Giuliani.
Let’s remember, by dawn on 9/11/2001, which BTW was the day of the primary to select the candidates who would succeed him, the general mood in NYC re: Rudy was of a general bent of “Thank you very much for your service, dude, you’ve given what you got, may we all please move on”. New York being New York there is high tolerance for someone being prickish, but showing results; he had kept cred from his prosecution days, plus was even willing to do drag on a public stage which at the time seemed a sign of a person who’ll laugh at himself, and there’s a respect for a guy who gets things done his way even if you may not fuly agree. But the “clean-up” already had detractors insofar as it was evident very early it would include a corporatization and “disneyfication” of the city that would keep going under Bloomberg, and there were some uncomfortable trends in its enforcement that are still a headache to this day.
What made Giuliani great in the general public eye in that immediate aftermath of 9/11 was that he did not get the deer-in-the-headlights look, nor just sat there while aides figured a secure location to move him to. That he and the surviving leadership of the main response agencies gathered themselves and were able to rally the town and say the things that needed to be said when they needed saying, in the middle of a fog of war. It helped that the people of NYC of 2001 turned out to be more ready to hold it together after the shit hit the fan, than many expected them to be, and just needed someone to take the lead. He fulfilled that role.
But that was it.
A mentioned it was within days he floated the idea of postponing the election, and even if it was just a brainfart while still somewhat dazed, people began remembering why they were looking forward to someone different.
Thing is, sure, it is very good to be The One Who Did Not Lose It When The World Was Ending Around Him. But as with other endeavors political life is years of routine tedium punctuated by moments of existential terror. Most days the world doesn’t end, so that skill is not put into practice often. Once out of office he began cashing in big as a “security consultant”, bt it seems often not really doing much consulting but rather as a Big Name to whom you paid Big Fees, to namecheck to show you were serious about security. (But is* Kept It Together When You Or I Would Have Shat Ourselves *really a scalable or transferrable skill you can build a consultancy upon?)
But after the failed presidential campaign, Rudy had drifted out of the spotlight. The arrival of Trump gives him a break to regain it, in this peculiar fellowship of “Noo Yawkers who take no shit from nobody”.
The Russian mafia did not become a problem in the US until after the fall of the USSR. This was after Giuliani resigned as US attorney in 1989.
The fall in crime in NYC was twice as large as the nation as a whole.
I grew up in NYC during the Giuliani years, and liked him a lot. I thought he had a good shot at becoming president and supported him fully. That is in my top ten things that I was embarrassingly wrong about in my life.
Don’t feel bad, I backed John Edwards in the primaries.
I never got the adoration heaped on him following 9/11. Precisely what was it that he did that someone else wouldn’t or couldn’t have done? I will give him credit for not cowering in a secure location like Dick Cheney. And as far as mobilizing the city resources effectively, I’ll grant that he probably did a capable job. Okay, he handled this test well. But I don’t think it warrants perpetual adoration. His behavior since then has done nothing but degrade his reputation. Sure, he handled the immediate aftermath well. And I got good grades in high school. But I don’t brag about those grades now because it was a long time ago and has nothing to do with the present. Giuliani shamelessly exploited 9/11 for years for personal political gain. It rather seemed like 9/11 became the happiest day of his life, it made him somebody and he never seemed to tire of it.
OK, he became a one-trick pony. If that was all that sullied his reputation, he wouldn’t look so bad today. But he embraced anti-Muslim bigotry. And he embraced Donald. He became a stooge. And even that wouldn’t make him look as bad as his descent into delusion. He no longer sounds like a former US attorney. He no longer sounds like a lawyer. He no longer sounds like a guy who graduated from high school, let alone law school. He seems to believe every Facebook lie that is posted about Hillary from the Russian bots. He continually damages the case of his client, who is too fucking stupid to let him go. Donald and Rudy deserve each other. I personally hope they spend the rest of their lives in prison.
What he did on 9/11, yes, anyone could have done. But nobody else did. Name me one other notable, of either party and in any position, interviewed on that day who chose to use their airtime constructively instead of trying to take partisan advantage.
But you’re right, of course, that none of that justifies or makes up for how he’s behaving now.
Giuliani presided over Stop and Frisk. That’s shit. I never thought highly of him, and did not agree with those that did.
Well, the planes hit in NYC, it’d be pretty strange for the mayor of Dayton to jump up and take charge.
No shock to me; I’ve disliked him for 3 decades. He’s been prominent on the NYC scene since the 80s as others have noted. In 1991 or so I was at a speech he gave at the college from which he graduated and my flesh still creeps at the memory of his in-person smarminess. He’s the living definition of the term “demagogue”.
About his marital indiscretions: shit happens, but this goes way beyond. He announced his divorce from Donna Hanover the year before 9/11 in a press interview–before he told her.
An article from May 2001:
"Though rumours swirled for years that the mayor was being unfaithful, Hanover always displayed behaviour more suited to the British upper classes than to revenge seeking New Yorkers, carrying out all public duties while acting the devoted wife and mother.
“Donna always fulfilled her official duties as Rudy’s wife with tremendous class,” says Linda Stasi, a columnist for the New York Post. “Whatever was going on in that marriage behind the scenes, she did what was required and gets incredibly high marks for grace under pressure.”
But the charade finally imploded last year when the mayor, under pressure to explain why he was squiring Nathan around Manhattan instead of his wife, announced to the media that he and Hanover were separating. There was only one problem. He hadn’t told Hanover."
He was estranged from his kids for years as well.
I grew up in the NY suburbs and off and on during the Giuliani era (but have lived in the Midwest for years). My wife installed a squeegee in our shower, and insists I use it after every shower, to prevent droplet stains on the walls.
We started using “giuliani” as a household verb — “Did you remember to giuliani the bathroom this morning?” — because it reminded me of the “squeegee men” — guys at the Third Avenue Bridge approach (where, by a quirk of geography, commuters were forced to drive a few blocks in the Bronx off the highways) who would “offer” to clean the windshield, or else threaten to break off the wiper.
As mayor, Rudy was famous for finally getting rid of that nuisance. Amen. But, most liberal New Yorkers were (rightly so, I think) not happy with the flipside of his attitude: the gentrification, the exacerbating of certain racialized crime incidents and knee-jerk police support.