While endorsing Mayor Mike Bloomberg for a third term in New York City recently, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that putting Bloomberg’s Democratic opponent in City Hall could take us back to the Dinkins era, when crime in New York was rampant. Some saw shades of race in Giuliani’s statement because Dinkins was black, as is Bloomberg’s current opponent, Bill Thompson. Giuliani’s remarks were based on facts, not color.
I was here in the city during Dinkins’ reign, and it was a much dirtier and scarier place. People were moving out in large numbers, businesses were relocating, and, worst of all, it seemed as if the police were immobilized and the powers that be in City Hall were turning a blind eye to all of it. You would not dream of walking around Times Square at 10:00 at night back then.
Bloomberg is far from perfect, but overall he has been a very effective Mayor whose years of business savvy have translated into political savvy. He is independent, he is not beholden to any special interests, and, for the most part, he gets results.
It is unfortunate that he had to tarnish his reputation by overturning term limits. Whether you are for or against term limits, the people of New York City voted for them. You cannot simply overturn the will of the people in order to suit your political ambitions. We all know Bloomberg loves being Mayor, but laws are laws. While he set a bad precedent with the term limits fiasco, Bloomberg remains the best person for the job. His opponent is untested and has yet to present a cogent argument as to why he would be a better Mayor than Bloomberg.
Back to David Dinkins. Leave it to The New York Times to offer a different view of his four years in office. In a recent piece titled “Another Look at the Dinkins Administration, and Not by Giuliani,” Michael Powell gives a tepid defense of Dinkins’ disastrous time as Mayor that has got to be one of the most ludicrous examples of revisionist history I have ever read. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, the fact that Rudy Giuliani won two terms (and easily could have won a third if term limits allowed him) speaks volumes.
Dinkins was an empty suit. He was elected on a platform of easing racial tensions, yet race relations got worse during his tenure. He had no leadership abilities, no convictions, and he downright broke the law when he failed to dispatch the necessary police force needed to stop the miscreants responsible for the 1991 Crown Heights riots or intervene in the boycott of a Korean-owned grocery in Flatbush. In both cases, the perpetrators were large numbers of black men. After four years of this, New Yorkers smartened up and elected someone who was not afraid to take action when needed, even if those actions weren’t always popular.
Alas, New Yorkers are like ungrateful children. While Giuliani remains popular statewide and on a national level, he is largely disliked in his own city. If he were to run for Mayor now, he would lose to any Democratic opponent.
His detractors forget how he cleaned up a city that was called “ungovernable.” They call him a bully. They say he is a racist because he refused to meet with frauds like Al Sharpton. Even Ed Koch, who I thought was a superb Mayor, has seemingly gone nuts in recent years, making nice with former enemies like Dinkins and Sharpton; going so far as to write a book called “Giuliani: Nasty Man.” These are the same people who seemed to have forgotten about the gas lines, hostages, and overall despair of the Jimmy Carter years, and now view Carter as a saint.
To use an admittedly odd canine analogy, Giuliani was a Doberman Pinscher who put himself on the front lines and knew when to bark, while Dinkins cowered in the corner like a nervous Chihuahua afraid of getting smacked for peeing on the rug.
