Adam's Apple
Senior Member
- Apr 25, 2004
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A Guy with Gumption
By John Leo for U.S. News & World Report
6/20/05 issue
Since I am going to say some nice things here about Rudy Giuliani, you may think this column is an early Rudy-for-president effort. It isn't. I don't think he has much of a chance to win the Republican nomination. He is a defender of gay rights and abortion and has remarried twice, once after a messy divorce. He is thin-skinned and self-absorbed, as historian Fred Siegel makes clear in his impressive new book, The Prince of the City (the reference is to Machiavelli, not Prince Charming). Most people think Giuliani fired Bill Bratton, the best police commissioner in the country (now in Los Angeles) because Bratton, and not Rudy, made the cover of Time.
Still, he is a person of enormous talent and courage who saved the city from a Detroit-like decline after the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan glumly said salvation could not come in "less than 30 years." Anyone entering politics to make a positive impact under hopeless conditions should read The Prince of the City and learn how it's done. Giuliani successfully assaulted, though he could not completely defeat, the intractable reactionary liberalism that brought New York City to its knees. Before he was elected in 1993, there were more than 2,000 murders a year there, compared with under 600 today. The city's welfare population, 1.1 million people, was about the size of the entire population of San Diego, the sixth-largest U.S. city. A poll showed that 60 percent of adult New Yorkers would like to leave the city. Along the four Greenwich Village blocks where I walked my daughter to her school each day, there was usually a long trail of freshly broken auto glass, meaning that most of the parked cars had been broken into, and would be broken into again, as soon as the glass could be replaced. The city was ungovernable--or so everyone said, often with a tone of perverse pride.
for full article:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/050620/20john.htm
By John Leo for U.S. News & World Report
6/20/05 issue
Since I am going to say some nice things here about Rudy Giuliani, you may think this column is an early Rudy-for-president effort. It isn't. I don't think he has much of a chance to win the Republican nomination. He is a defender of gay rights and abortion and has remarried twice, once after a messy divorce. He is thin-skinned and self-absorbed, as historian Fred Siegel makes clear in his impressive new book, The Prince of the City (the reference is to Machiavelli, not Prince Charming). Most people think Giuliani fired Bill Bratton, the best police commissioner in the country (now in Los Angeles) because Bratton, and not Rudy, made the cover of Time.
Still, he is a person of enormous talent and courage who saved the city from a Detroit-like decline after the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan glumly said salvation could not come in "less than 30 years." Anyone entering politics to make a positive impact under hopeless conditions should read The Prince of the City and learn how it's done. Giuliani successfully assaulted, though he could not completely defeat, the intractable reactionary liberalism that brought New York City to its knees. Before he was elected in 1993, there were more than 2,000 murders a year there, compared with under 600 today. The city's welfare population, 1.1 million people, was about the size of the entire population of San Diego, the sixth-largest U.S. city. A poll showed that 60 percent of adult New Yorkers would like to leave the city. Along the four Greenwich Village blocks where I walked my daughter to her school each day, there was usually a long trail of freshly broken auto glass, meaning that most of the parked cars had been broken into, and would be broken into again, as soon as the glass could be replaced. The city was ungovernable--or so everyone said, often with a tone of perverse pride.
for full article:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/050620/20john.htm
