by John Tierney
Like the impassioned zealots of Italian opera and like Fiorello
La Guardia, his role model, Rudolph Giuliani pushes forward
righteously- and with dramatic impact.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, not one to underestimate himself, feels a
certain kinship when he looks at the portrait of Fiorello La
Guardia that hangs behind his desk at City Hall. "A really
terrific role model," Mayor Giuliani calls him. So far the
resemblance has eluded most other New Yorkers. In the public
mind Fiorello La Guardia is the Little Flower, the builder of
modern New York, the benevolent figure who read the comics to
children on the radio; Rudolph Giuliani is the control freak,
the slasher of budgets, the taut face denouncing the vile
stupidity of his enemies on television every night. But consider
a few judgments of these Mayors rendered by journalists and
public officials of both eras. (For quiz purposes, telltale
past-tense verbs have been changed.) See if you can distinguish
which of these statements refer to Mayor La Guardia and which
refer to Mayor Giuliani:
"He was the last reformer as Mayor," Giuliani says of La
Guardia. "For his time he captured exactly what New York City
needed: somebody who can challenge the assumptions and is
willing to be controversial" Giuliani read a biography of La
Guardia during the 1993 campaign, and one of his first acts as
Mayor was to move La Guardia's desk and portrait into his
office. It was a presumptuous thing to do, but in his first two
years Giuliani has fulfilled at least part of his mission. No
Mayor since La Guardia has challenged so many assumptions and
created so much controversy.
Why, his critics keep asking, can't Giuliani disagree with
people without insulting them? Why must he always be right,
always in charge? Was it really necessary to create an
international incident by ejecting Yasir Arafat from Lincoln
Center) Isn't there something awry in the civic culture on a day
when the tabloid front pages proclaim "RUDY'S ONE RUDE DUDE" (an
opinion from the State Department) and "GO TO HELL" (a farewell
message from Arafat)? Each new fight prompts new analyses of his
character flaws, new predictions of doom for--him and the city.
Yet somehow, despite all these flaws, he has accomplished more
in two years than almost anyone imagined possible. Facing one of
the worst fiscal crises in city history, he balanced two budgets
while cutting taxes. The municipal labor force has shrunk, but
the streets and parks are cleaner. Crime has dropped so sharply
that New York is now one of America's safest cities, and the
Police Department's new tactics are being copied around the
country. The city is reducing its welfare rolls and running the
nation's largest workfare program. Giuliani hasn't yet
reinvented New York's government, but he has begun to reshape
it, and he has transformed the city's political debate. He has
challenged the assumptions of big-city liberalism, the
philosophy that dominated New York for six decades ever since
that other Italian-American Republican reformer became Mayor.
In 1934 La Guardia took over a city essentially bankrupted by
the Depression and Tammany Hall's corruption. He demolished the
Democratic machine by firing thousands of Tammany's political
hacks. But soon he replaced them with even more employees to
issue regulations and run housing projects, hospitals and
welfare programs. He created a new establishment, something of a
Fiorello Hall, with a progressive faith that was not shaken by
rising taxes and worsening deficits. The city already had budget problems
by the time La Guardia left office in 1945, but Fiorello Hall's ambitions kept
growing in the ensuing decades. The fiscal crisis of 1975 required a retrenchment,
but the city's budgets went right back up when the 80's boom brought in new tax
revenues.
'The biggest and largest special-interest group in the city is the intellectual
establishment. Giuliani says. 'New York is a great intellectual center that
has become...unwilling to think a new thought.'