Rudy Giuliani’s sad self-destuction: How “America’s mayor” became just another GOP sidewalk lunatic

[DonViejo]

Rudy Giuliani’s sad self-destuction: How “America’s mayor” became just another GOP sidewalk lunatic

There 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 wasn’t just being diplomatic or clever yesterday when he said he feels sad and sorry for Rudy Giuliani, the former “America’s mayor” who’s been raging like a sidewalk lunatic at President Obama. There actually is something sad about Rudy’s long self-destruction, which began before his disastrous presidential primary bid of 2008. Sad, but possibly instructive to the future sidewalk lunatics among today’s 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 didn’t have to believe all of Giuliani’s “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 Giuliani’s, than during Giuliani’s then-seven years in office (1994-2001).

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/22/rudy_giulianis_sad_self_destuction_how_americas_mayor_became_just_another_gop_sidewalk_lunatic/

[SoapBox]

1. America's Moron.

[nichomachus]

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]

3. He's proved himself

Trump worthy

[Cha]

4. ODS will do that to them..