America’s Mayor

Recommend...del.icio.us Digg it Furl Netvouz Netscape Newsvine reddit Yahoo MyWeb May 4th, 2006 at 01:28pm Alec

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in Iowa this week to speak at the “Get Motivated” seminar in Des Moines, raise cash for Lamberti and Nussle, and help sap 50,000 dollars of the state’s cash (what, do you think George Forman was drawing traffic?).

Of course there was another not-so-secret reason America’s mayor was in town—to work Iowa voters and donors in the initial stages of a possible run for President. When asked whether he’s planning to run, he responded:

I’ve got a lot of places to go, and a lot of people to talk to; a long process of figuring out whether it makes sense to run for president in 2008. I don’t know the answer to that yet.

As a native New Yorker and now an Iowan, let me help answer the question—don’t run. Not now, not ever.

Sure, since September 11^th, Rudy Giuliani has been getting more good press than Barak Obama (a tall order), and he’s often credited with cleaning up New York and helping to make it the safe city it is today (even though serious crime began to fall drastically during the previous Democratic mayor’s term), but few outside of New York know the other side of Giuliani; the Rudy who policed morality and speech, who flouted the constitution, and who gutted funding for the city’s poor.

At a time when our civil liberties are under attack, Giuliani, who, while Mayor, won only 4 of 26 first-amendment related cases in court, is the last thing the country needs. Here’s a sample of some choice Rudy moments.

In 1999, after the Brooklyn Museum of Art displayed a controversial painting, Giuliani tried to cut the museum’s public financing and terminate its lease. He then threatened to “cut off city financing to any other publicly supported cultural institution” that similarly failed to censor itself. Soon after, he proposed starting a commission on “decency” to review all of the city’s cultural institutions and make recommendations on financing.

In order to cut drunk driving, the Mayor attempted to institute a plan that gave police officers who suspected someone had been drunk driving “the authority to seize a person’s car, sell it and funnel the proceeds to the city — even if the driver turns out to be innocent.” Sure drunk driving is a serious offense and laws against it should be enforced aggressively—but selling a person’s property for a crime they haven’t been convicted of? Maybe Rudy forgot the law part of law and order.

As for helping the city’s poor, the Giuliani administration reduced capital spending on affordable housing by 44% and cut back on the creation of apartments for homeless households by 75%.

And those are just a few of the real winners. Thankfully, he supports a woman’s right to choose, gun control, and gay rights, so he’s socially liberal enough to flop in a Republican primary.

But if some cruel twist of fate gives Rudy a legitimate shot at being President, Iowans should keep in mind who Giuliani really is– a callous bully and a culture cop.

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