Rudy’s Resume
By
Bat One
on January 30, 2007 at 03:03 pm
15 Comments
For Neiman, and Zsa Zsa, who share my enthusiasm for Newt Gingrich the thinker and the leader, and also question his electability, and for others starting to look seriously at the field of potential 2008 GOP presidential candidates, here’s a link to Steven Malanga’s excellent article at City Journal recalling Rudy Giuliani’s accomplishments as mayor of New York and answering at least some of the questions about Giuliani’s brand of conservatism. (Hat Tip to my friend, Donny Baseball for the Malanga link)
Giuliani’s achievements as New York’s mayor were monumental long before the events of 9-11. The corruption and abysmal dysfunction that preceded him, and the abject hopelessness that marked the administration of David Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor, make the turnaround under Rudy all the more remarkable.
Crime:
Welfare Reform:
Budget, Finances, and the Private Sector Economy:
Malanga is nothing if not a devout evangelist, and he tends to ignore Giuliani’s stands in favor of gun control, abortion “rights,” gay civil unions, and his less than ecumenical three marriages. For social conservatives, these are serious negatives to be overcome, and if the elections of last November are any indication, the GOP can ill afford to further alienate so substantial a portion of the “base.”
But while Giuliani’s social liberalism is a legitimate concern for the would-be presidential candidate, it does not detract from his stunning accomplishments in reforming and revitalizing a city whose budget is greater than that of all but a half dozen states.
Giuliani’s Reaganesque reliance on tax cuts, the private sector economy, and personal responsibility, rather than the welfare-based, multi-cultural, corruption and ineptitude that marked the administrations of Dinkens and other liberal predecessors, made Rudy a hero to real, working New Yorkers long before the 9-11 calamity. And if early polls are any sort of an indication (likely not), Giuliani is the only potential GOP candidate to beat each and every potential Democrat candidate (including “Snow White” and all seven dwarfs.)
Steven Malanga’s piece hardly qualifies as “fair and balanced,” but there is much to be learned about Rudy Giuliani’s tenure prior to the events of 9-11. And this is an excellent place to start.
Read the whole thing.
Giuliani’s achievements as New York’s mayor were monumental long before the events of 9-11. The corruption and abysmal dysfunction that preceded him, and the abject hopelessness that marked the administration of David Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor, make the turnaround under Rudy all the more remarkable.
Crime:
For Giuliani, the revival of New York started with securing public safety, because all other agendas were useless if citizens didn’t feel protected. “The most fundamental of civil rights is the guarantee that government can give you a reasonable degree of safety,” Giuliani said. He aimed to do so by reinstituting respect for the law…
As mayor, he instituted a “zero tolerance” approach that cracked down on quality-of-life offenses like panhandling and public urination (in a city where some streets reeked of urine), in order to restore a sense of civic order that he believed would discourage larger crimes. “Murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes,” he explained. “But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”
The policing innovations led to a historic drop in crime far beyond what anyone could have imagined, with total crime down by some 64 percent during the Giuliani years, and murder (the most reliable crime statistic) down 67 percent, from 1,960 in Dinkins’s last year to 640 in Giuliani’s last year. The number of cars stolen in New York City every year plummeted by an astounding 78,000…
Welfare Reform:
By 1999, the number of welfare recipients finding work had risen to more than 100,000 annually, and the welfare rolls had dropped by more than 600,000…
As part of Giuliani’s quintessentially conservative belief that dysfunctional behavior, not our economic system, lay at the heart of intergenerational poverty, he also spoke out against illegitimacy and the rise of fatherless families… he added that changing society’s attitude toward marriage was more important than anything government could do: “[I]f you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, . . . I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.”
Budget, Finances, and the Private Sector Economy:
Giuliani’s efforts to revive entrepreneurial New York naturally focused on unleashing the city’s private sector through tax cuts achieved by slowing the growth of government. Giuliani preached against New York’s lingering New Deal belief that government creates jobs, arguing that government should instead get out of the way and let the private sector work… When Giuliani took office, the city’s private sector was experiencing the worst of times. After four years under Dinkins, it had shrunk to its lowest level since 1978, losing 275,000 jobs—192,000 in 1991 alone, the largest one-year job decline that any American city had ever suffered.
After years of tax hikes under Dinkins, Giuliani proposed making up the city’s still-huge budget deficit entirely through spending cuts and savings. Even more audaciously, he proposed a modest tax cut to signal the business community that New York was open for business, promising more tax cuts later…
Although Giuliani was no tax or economic expert when he took office, he became a tax-cut true believer when he saw how the city’s economy and targeted industries perked up at his first reductions. One of his initial budgetary moves was to cut the city’s hotel tax, which during the Dinkins administration had been the highest of any major world city. When tourism rebounded, Giuliani pointed out that the city was collecting more in taxes from a lower rate. “No one ever considered tax reductions a reasonable option,” Giuliani explained. But, he added in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Library, “targeted tax reductions spur growth. That’s why we have made obtaining targeted tax reductions a priority of every budget.” In his eight years in office, Giuliani reduced or eliminated 23 taxes, including the sales tax on some clothing purchases, the tax on commercial rents everywhere outside of Manhattan’s major business districts, and various taxes on small businesses and self-employed New Yorkers.
Malanga is nothing if not a devout evangelist, and he tends to ignore Giuliani’s stands in favor of gun control, abortion “rights,” gay civil unions, and his less than ecumenical three marriages. For social conservatives, these are serious negatives to be overcome, and if the elections of last November are any indication, the GOP can ill afford to further alienate so substantial a portion of the “base.”
But while Giuliani’s social liberalism is a legitimate concern for the would-be presidential candidate, it does not detract from his stunning accomplishments in reforming and revitalizing a city whose budget is greater than that of all but a half dozen states.
Giuliani’s Reaganesque reliance on tax cuts, the private sector economy, and personal responsibility, rather than the welfare-based, multi-cultural, corruption and ineptitude that marked the administrations of Dinkens and other liberal predecessors, made Rudy a hero to real, working New Yorkers long before the 9-11 calamity. And if early polls are any sort of an indication (likely not), Giuliani is the only potential GOP candidate to beat each and every potential Democrat candidate (including “Snow White” and all seven dwarfs.)
Steven Malanga’s piece hardly qualifies as “fair and balanced,” but there is much to be learned about Rudy Giuliani’s tenure prior to the events of 9-11. And this is an excellent place to start.
Read the whole thing.
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