It’s not possible to be neutral about Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and now a Republican presidential candidate. You either love him or hate him. The novelist Kevin Baker does not love him. In the August issue of Harper’s Baker gives Giuliani a pretty thorough hiding, in a cover piece (subscription required) headed A FATE WORSE THAN BUSH. The opening sentence sets the tone:
“Rudolph Giuliani has, by far, the most dubious known personal history of any major presidential candidate in US history, what with his three marriages, and his open affairs and his almost total estrangement from his grown children, not to mention the startling frequency with which he finds excuses to dress in women’s clothing.”
Rudy is not going to run for president in a frock, alas. He’s going to run as a crime buster and enemy of terror. In neither role is he especially convincing, however. As Baker points out, the crime rate began to drop in New York under Giuliani’s predecessor as Mayor, the (black) Democrat David Dinkins — at a time when crime rates were falling throughout the United States. Likewise Giuliani’s fighting talk on terrorism, like all fighting talk on terrorism these days, sounds false. During the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina in May, he seemed both petulant and pious when he rebuked the conservative Ron Paul for suggesting that 9/ll was blowback — the result of America’s interventionist foreign policy. In case you missed the exchange, here it is:
What a depressing thought it is, though, that in a nation of 300 million the two people most the likely to win their party’s nominations are Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton: both former McGovern Democrats, both supporters of the invasion of Iraq and both upholders of a woman’s ‘right to choose’. Quintessential liberals, in other words. There is little to choose between them.
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