"GIULIANI? Sure. He was the mayor, back around the turn of the century. It was a great time in the city. Crime went down, the Yankees won four championships, and Wall Street went into the stratosphere."
Is that the way we'll remember Rudy? Hard to tell without knowing if he gets the GOP nomination. But whether he does or he doesn't, the recap shouldn't be all that glittery.
"The City Is Cleaner and Safer." The Giuliani mantra. He was the soi-disant new sheriff in town, striding down to City Hall to clean house. He plucked Bill Bratton out of Boston and made him police commissioner. New methodology was developed. Crime went down. In fact, crime figures were down over much of the country. But it was Bratton at a choice table at Elaine's, Bratton on the cover of Time, in a classic trench coat-and-rainy-street shot. Rudy wasn't so happy to see his appointee get the credit, deserved or not, for what many saw as the major accomplishment of his administration, and Bratton was gone.
Money covers a lot of sins, and Wall Street was incandescent in the 90s. Rudy's first term coincided with a run-up of staggering verticality in the Dow. Volcanic financial movements like this help the entire country; here in Gotham, they provide showers of doubloons from the stock-transfer tax and sales tax. Having a bulging treasury and a drop in crime are every mayor's dream daily double. Rudy couldn't really take credit for the boom, although having it take place on his watch wasn't a bad thing. Rudy opened parks, increased payrolls, cut a lot of ribbons. He had to do something with the money.
The party ended in 2001. But Sept. 11 gave Rudy an even bigger stage. He was the leader who would guide us through the tragedy. He appeared with Governor Pataki and President Bush, in ill-fitting, stenciled windbreakers, showing the world how an ex-US attorney from Brooklyn took care of business.
Six years later, the perspective has changed a bit. The fire and police unions and the families of the dead and dying have tired of Rudy channeling as St. George, saying that he got lots of airtime but never made sure that his guys had masks, never checked the reports saying that the miasma on Church Street wasn't toxic. Rudy didn't really look back. He was term-limited, and had his sights set on the same Senate seat coveted by Mrs. Clinton. What was done was done, and it would be up to the next guy to tidy up.
The next guy had been an Eagle Scout before heading off to Johns Hopkins and the MBA program at Harvard. In 2001 he switched parties and won the mayoral election as a Republican. Although he'd never held elective office, he campaigned on the belief that a good businessman was just what the city needed to get back on its feet. Voters may not have been familiar with his politics, but we knew about 8 billion reasons to believe that he knew what he was talking about.
The managerial expertise appeared early. "Accountability" and "accessibility" became the keywords of his team. After Sept. 11, the subway's vulnerability ranked high on the worry list. Mike Bloomberg rode the IRT down to City Hall, day after day, shaking hands, reading the paper, keeping calm. His approach, presented with something that didn't work, was to have it fixed, and, if that didn't work, replace it. And he had the successful mogul's approach to spending: if you can't pay for it, don't buy it.
"Taxes are not good things, but if you want services, somebody's got to pay for them, so they're a necessary evil." There was screaming about tax hikes and budget cuts, but the bottom line was that Bloomberg eliminated the city's $6 billion budget deficit. There was more uproar when he dismantled the most entrenched bureaucracy north of the Pentagon, the city's Board of Education, and replaced it with a more effective and responsive body. The consensus was, "Why not? Who's he gonna be afraid of?"
The legacy of Bloomberg's administrations appears to be fiscal conservatism coupled with liberal social policies. He has led the country's mayors in the fight for gun control, but he seems to understand that crime is not the cause of poverty and despair but their bitter fruit. To a lifelong resident, the energy in New York City today is impressive, if not always comprehensible. Bloomberg's focus on fighting poverty, improving education, and providing healthcare may not be driving the whole show, but, as the old lady said about the chicken soup, it doesn't hurt.
Mayor Mike will be 66 on Valentine's Day, and it's not looking like he's gearing up for a run at the presidency. He's too busy giving away money - he's the country's seventh-biggest private donor - and he deserves a little relaxation, not four years of fighting with Congress.
But it's a damned shame. The country could use a smart guy like Mike.
Bill Mehlman is a New York resident and writer.
