Leadership

Rating:
Summary: Rudy Giuliani: New York Liberal
Review: The version of himself that Rudolph Giuliani and his co-author Ken Kerson present in this book bears only a partial and blatantly politicized resemblance to reality. The Rudolph Giuliani who ran for mayor of New York in 1989 (unsuccessfully) and again in 1993 and 1997 (successfully) was essentially a Bill Clinton Democrat calling himself a Republican. You would scarcely know it from this book, but it's true. He was (and presumably still is, even if he prefers not to dwell on it) pro-"partial birth" abortion, pro-gun control, and pro-gay rights. As recently as 1997, to secure the support of the left-wing teachers union for his reelection campaign, he was opposed to school vouchers. That same year he denounced his state's Republican governor for trying to reform New York's obsolete and counter-productive rent control laws.

What? You honestly believed Giuliani was elected mayor in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 by campaigning as a Dick Cheney clone? It was not for nothing that he had the nomination of the New York State Liberal Party in all three of his mayoral campaigns. (New York is one of the few states that allows candidates to be endorsed by more than one party.) When first elected in 1993, he got 100,000 votes on the Liberal line while his margin victory was only around 90,000. Do the math. He couldn't have been elected dog catcher without the Liberal nomination.

LEADERSHIP is not so much a book as it is an extended brochure for a future political campaign. No longer answerable to NYC's Democratic majority, he's now positioning himself for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination by donning a conservative mask. Don't be fooled. Throughout the book he just happens to dwell on the two aspects of his record, crime and welfare reform, that might appeal to conservatives -- while downplaying everything else. Yet even on crime and welfare reform, he's not that far from Bill and Hillary Clinton. A sober appraisal of the Giuliani record reveals that he agrees with the Clintons more often than he disagrees with them.

Imagine Bill Clinton with a bad attitude, a bad combover (since removed) and just one extramarital girlfriend, and you've got Rudolph Giuliani.

Giuliani's only other claim to conservative fame was his opposition to taxpayer funding for the Brooklyn Museum, a controversy he discusses at some length in the book (of course). Yet a closer look at the timing strongly suggests that it was a politically-motivated contrivance. For years Giuliani supported or condoned similarly "offensive" exhibits at city-subsidized venues without saying a peep. It was not until he was thinking of running for the U.S. Senate in 1999-2000 and needed Republican campaign cash from around the country that he suddenly morphed into the Reverend Pat Robertson. It also explains his school voucher flip-flop. Similar flip-flops will be forthcoming.

Again, don't be fooled.