FALSE NOTES FROM GUILANI'S HOUSE ORGAN. During Rudy Giuliani's tenure as mayor of New York City, the conservative periodical City Journal, associated with the Manhattan Institute, functioned as a sort of house organ. They justified Giuliani's policies with a neoconservative critique of the welfare state and urban underclass social norms, while helping to churn out the policy ideas he implemented. (Indeed, they boast in the first paragraph of the "About" page of their website, "During the Giuliani Administration, the magazine served as an idea factory as the then-mayor revivified New York City, quickly becoming, in the words of the New York Post, 'the place where Rudy gets his ideas.' The Public Interest goes further, calling City Journal �the magazine that saved the city.�) So it should come as no surprise that they are now flacking for Giuliani's nascent presidential campaign. There is a very long article by Steven Malanga in the new issue of City Journal, claiming that Guiliani governed as a conservative and is an electable candidate. It is full of all the usual Giuliani-booster tricks -- crediting, for example, nearly every good thing that happened in New York, or bad thing that didn't, to Giuliani, without explaining why, say, the absence of severe race riots in his tenure is in any particular way thanks to him and not to myriad other social forces. (For another prime example of this kind of crediting Giuliani by assertion rather than argument, see "Candidate Giuliani" by Fred Siegel, in last summer's Commentary.) Though Giuliani has some legitimate achievements to point to, Malanga takes an almost comically one-sided view of his tenure. He neglects to acknowledge that city spending actually rose under Giuliani and only the booming economy kept its tax revenues high enough that the budget stayed out of the red. Malanga sets out at the beginning to debunk the perception that Giuliani's personal foibles or moderate social views will make him anathema to conservative voters, but he ignores those issues throughout his piece. And, most importantly to the Giuliani mythology, he cuts to September 11th and Giualiani's ensuing beatification without mentioning that, just before it, his approval ratings were tanking and he had to pull out of a 2000 Senate race he seemed likely to lose to Hillary Clinton. This is the factoid that progressives must remember to whip out any time pundits trumpet Giuliani's success or popularity as mayor -- he was a deeply polarizing figure whose political fortunes were saved by a catastrophe on his watch (and one that was not aided by Giuliani's curious decision to put the office of emergency management in the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing.) The false perception that Giuliani was always a widely revered figure in New York is one that drives this New Yorker crazy, and progressives should disabuse everyone of if they don't want to see a President Giuliani.
--Ben Adler
