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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRudy Giuliani’s sad self-destuction: How “America’s mayor” became just another GOP sidewalk lunatic
Rudy Giulianis sad self-destuction: How Americas mayor became just another GOP sidewalk lunaticThere is an important lesson here for us all: How often genuine political promise coexists with puerility and worse
JIM SLEEPER
White House press secretary Josh Earnest wasnt just being diplomatic or clever yesterday when he said he feels sad and sorry for Rudy Giuliani, the former Americas mayor whos been raging like a sidewalk lunatic at President Obama. There actually is something sad about Rudys long self-destruction, which began before his disastrous presidential primary bid of 2008. Sad, but possibly instructive to the future sidewalk lunatics among todays Republican presidential-wannabes. Maybe you had to be with Giuliani at the start of his electoral career to learn what they and the rest of us should learn from this spectacle: not to gloat or cluck our tongues, but to consider how often genuine political promise coexists with puerility and worse.
Throughout the fall, 1993 New York mayoral campaign, I tried harder than any other commentator I know of to convince my left-liberal friends that Giuliani would win and that he probably should, because Democrats had all-but asked for it.
In my New York Daily News column, in the New Republic, and on cable and network TV, I insisted it had come to this because racial Rainbow and welfare-state politics were imploding, not just in New York and not only thanks to racists, Ronald Reagan or robber barons, but because something had gone wrong with liberal politics itself. You didnt have to believe all of Giulianis colorblind, law-and-order, free-market rhetoric to want some big shifts in liberal Democratic paradigms and to see that, in New York City, some of those shifts would require a political battering ram, not a scalpel.
I spent a lot of time with Giuliani during the 1993 campaign and during his first year in City Hall, and while I criticized him several times for presuming far too much, I defended a lot of his record to the end of his tenure, and still would defend some of it. He forced New York, that great capital of root cause answers to every social problem, to get real about remedies that worked, in the world that we had to work with. Some of these remedies turned out to be preconditions for progress of any kind: I saw Al Sharpton blink as I reminded him in a debate that twice as many New Yorkers had been felled by police bullets during David Dinkins four-year mayoralty, which preceded Giulianis, than during Giulianis then-seven years in office (1994-2001).
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http://www.salon.com/2015/02/22/rudy_giulianis_sad_self_destuction_how_americas_mayor_became_just_another_gop_sidewalk_lunatic/
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Rudy Giuliani’s sad self-destuction: How “America’s mayor” became just another GOP sidewalk lunatic (Original Post)
DonViejo
Feb 2015
OP
SoapBox
(18,791 posts)1. America's Moron.
nichomachus
(12,754 posts)2. Misleading story
He was always a sidewalk lunatic. It's just that people in the US weren't thinking clearly after 9-11.
Danascot
(4,690 posts)3. He's proved himself
Trump worthy
Cha
(297,323 posts)4. ODS will do that to them..