AS GOOD, IF NOT BETTER.One of the reasons that Michael Bloomberg is mayor of New York goes back to the moment in the 2001 campaign when Democratic candidate Mark Green said that he would have done "as good if not better" a job of handling 9/11 as Rudy Giuliani, a quote which Bloomberg used to devastating effect in an ad. As with most things that are called "gaffes," it was probably true, as we can see in retrospect from Wayne Barrett's article in the Village Voice on the five big lies of Giuliani's post-9/11 performance. So there is a kind of rough ironic justice in Giuliani's almost parallel statement yesterday that he was the equal of the 9/11 recovery workers because, "I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers." One can only hope that this gaffe is at least as fatal, if not more so, to Giuliani's ambitions as it was to Green's. One further comment on Giuliani's 9/11 reputation: It's always seemed to me that the sense that Giuliani did things right that day and subsequently depended largely on the contrast with Bush. If Bush hadn't been flying around the country and acting like a doofus, we might not have noticed Giuliani, outside of New York. But we needed someone to seem like a grownup that day, and Giuliani was the closest thing we had. --Mark Schmitt
