The other night I was having dinner with two friends in an Upper
West Side restaurant when an extraordinarily loud group of about a
dozen people settled into the next table.
Before we knew what had happened, one man had sat down at our
table and started filling out a questionnaire. I was about to ask
him to leave when the female of our group, being more conciliatory,
asked him what he was doing. Turns out it was the local Democratic
club and he was filling out a ballot on who he liked for
President.
This kicked off a political discussion and before long the
subject of Rudy Giuliani came up. Our uninvited guest was scornful.
“Giuliani was the worst mayor we’ve had in the last fifty years,”
he announced.
Didn’t he revive the city? Didn’t he stop crime? Wouldn’t his
group be worried about walking home tonight if it hadn’t been for
Giuliani?
“Do you know anything about demographics?” our guest asked
patronizingly. “Who commit crimes? It’s young men between the ages
of 16 and 24, right? All that happened in the 1990s is that the
population of 16-to-24-year-olds declined. That’s why crime went
down. Giuliani had nothing to do with it.”
I won’t bore you with the rest of the conversation but you can
imagine how it went. New York liberals are an amazing lot. Their
politics come right out of The Nation and the editorial
pages of the New York Times. Logic never penetrates. Did
the population of New York City really decline 60 percent
in the 1990s to match the 60 percent decline in crime? Did it
decline at all? Oh well, it’s not the facts that count, just the
smug certainty that nothing is ever what it seems.
“A prophet is always without honor in his own country.” I’ve
always liked Jesus’ first apothegm in the Bible. While the rest of
the country is falling in love with Rudy Giuliani, he is an outcast
in his own home city — at least the elite portion of it — and
will remain so probably right up until November 2008, when he may
become the first mayor ever to catapult directly into the White
House.
THE LONG KNIVES HAVE BEEN out for Giuliani ever since he started
proving liberals wrong in the 1990s, and it’s only going to get
worse. “Him?” was the one-word headline on the cover story in
New York last week, followed by, “New Yorkers may be
surprised by how far Rudy Giuliani has come already. But that’s
only because we know him.”
As a footnote, it should be pointed out that Giuliani won a
landslide re-election in 1997 in a city that is less than 20
percent Republican. Polls are already showing Rudy running even
with fellow New Yorker Hillary Clinton and winning New Jersey, a
more representative Democratic state. When New York refers
to “New Yorkers,” it is only describing a very isolated,
self-satisfied slice of the population.
Nonetheless, the collective wisdom among this smug sector has
been that once the rest of the country really understands
Giuliani, they will reject him. Strangely, the portion they expect
the rest of the country to reject is his liberal views.
(Somehow this logic never applies to Democratic candidates.) Wait
until those yokels find out Rudy supports abortion. Wait until they
discover he roomed with a gay couple. Then he will be toast.
To everyone’s astonishment — in Manhattan, at least — it isn’t
happening. For some strange reason those country bumpkins aren’t
proving so dumb after all. They understand a Presidential election
can’t be a referendum on abortion. They may even be more tolerant
of gay couples than the stand-up comedians tell us. And remember,
all this is only operative for the Republican primaries. If
Giuliani gets into a general election, he may even be perceived as
tolerant. In the end, voters look for character and
leadership, not a menu of position papers. That would put the
Democrats in big trouble.
Just to show how far off-base liberals already stand, Stephen
Rodrick, author of the New York piece, clinches his
argument by quoting Bob Shrum, the famed Democratic consultant who
insisted on calling John Kerry “Mr. President” early on November 2,
2004, and has never won an election before or since. “There’s a
reason Giuliani’s using 9/11 as an asset,” says Schrum. “It’s his
only asset. He’s not even running on his mayoral record.
He’s running on a few weeks [after] September 11.”
Is this guy kidding? Just before Giuliani was elected in 1993,
Time ran a cover story on “The Rotting Apple.” Three years
later, Giuliani was on the cover as “The Man Who Saved New York.”
(It was only five years later he became “Man of the Year” in 2001.)
Read Fred Siegel’s Prince of the City and you will find 90
percent of Giuliani’s accomplishments came before September 11th.
He cut murders from 2,100 a year to less than 800. He drove the
mafia out of the Fulton Fish Market — even though a few city
officials almost got killed in the process. He cut taxes in a city
that had never seen a tax cut. He cut spending (ditto). He faced
off against every municipal union in the city — including the
police, who rioted against him. He pulled New York’s economy so far
out of the depths that for the first time since the 1950s the city
grew faster than the rest of the country. (Under David
Dinkins and Mario Cuomo, New York had lost one out of every five
jobs during the 1991 recession.)
THE CRIME THING IS SO SURE to come up over and over in the campaign
that’s it’s worth retelling what really happened. In the 1960s, the
U.S. Supreme Court and general social trends softened up law
enforcement so that crime took off, almost tripling during the
1970s and 1980s. Liberals chattered about finding the “root causes
of crime,” but sentences were drastically reduced and the police
were told to lay off “victimless” crimes such as loitering, public
drunkenness, and low-level drug dealing.
In 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling wrote an article for
the Atlantic Monthly called “Broken Windows,” which
posited that policing small infractions and maintaining
public order was the key to controlling larger crimes. When small
things went unenforced, the public became fearful and the bad guys
concluded they could get away with bigger things. The thesis
rattled around policy circles for more than a decade without much
effect.
In 1992, Herb London, head of the Gallatin School at NYU and a
conservative candidate for mayor, made a radical suggestion in the
pages of the New York Post. “Let’s choose one
place in New York and try to restore order by policing
anti-social behavior,” he said. London proposed Washington Square
Park, where until the 1960s it had been illegal to lie on the
grass. At this point, people were dealing drugs and urinating in
public. London’s suggestion went unheeded.
Two years later, Giuliani was elected. Before taking office, he
sat through a few prepping conferences at the Manhattan Institute
absorbing conservative ideas. “Broken Windows” was one of them.
From day one Giuliani began putting it into practice. The “squeegee
men” (who used to harass motorists at stop light) were gone in
days. Turnstile jumping — which had reached more than 50 percent
in some stations — was halted. Within weeks the results began to
take effect. A frightened populace began to come out of hiding.
Before Giuliani people had been afraid to walk their dogs. Within
six months they were strolling at night on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Crime plummeted and didn’t stop falling until it returned to
1965 levels. In no other city did this happen — only in New York.
By the time President Clinton ran for re-election in 1996 he was
bragging about national crime reduction — even though the
entire drop was due to falling rates in New York. Gradually
other cities picked up the idea — although in some like New
Orleans and Detroit it never happened.
Was all this due to demographics? Was it because (as Clinton
claimed) the federal government had funded a few thousand police
officers? Was it — as University of Chicago economist Steven
Levitt scurrilously suggests in Freakonomics — the result
of abortion? No. The entire trend is directly traceable to
Giuliani’s crime policies.
Rudy Giuliani would be a serious candidate for President even if
September 11th had never occurred. To the despair of the New York
intelligentsia, the local boy may be about to make good. Don’t
expect any tickertape parades.
*****
I’ve been criticizing the conduct of the war recently and taking
a lot of flak from Spectator readers who say I’m just
another East Coast elitist watching the conflict on CNN without any
idea of what’s really going on. So I’ve decided to take them up on
it. I’ll be flying into Iraq Thursday for a two week embed with the
82nd Airborne. I don’t have an agenda. I just want to see what the
troops are saying. I’ll be reporting soon from Baghdad.
