Jacob Laksin: The Times vs. Rudy
[Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. His e-mail is jlaksin@gmail.com.]
You would expect the New York Times to come down against Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, it’s a safe bet that American liberalism’s paper of record would find little to admire in any Republican candidate for the presidency. What you might not expect is that, months before primary season, the paper would commit its full resources to flinging dirt at the Republican candidate whose views, at least on social issues, most approximate its own.
Yet, in recent months, the Times on its front page has been waging all-out war against the former mayor. The opening salvo was launched in May, when the paper ran a piece airing allegations that Giuliani was responsible for the illnesses developed by emergency-response workers toiling at Ground Zero after September 11. The paper’s own reporting indicated that there was little substance to the accusations. For instance, in the days following the attacks, Giuliani stressed that emergency personnel were required to wear masks at Ground Zero as a precaution against contaminated air. The mayor’s department of health issued similar warnings. As recovery efforts stretched on, however, many, caught up in the frantic work of seeking out survivors, failed to comply with the cautions. Could the mayor have done more to make sure that safety procedures were followed? Possibly. But the complaints featured in the Times were not really about Giuliani’s post-911 leadership.
Rather, they signaled the revival of an older battle between the mayor and the city’s public employee unions. As a U.S. Attorney in the 1980s, Giuliani had made a name for himself by taking on mob influence in New York labor unions. Henceforth, his relations with organized labor would be adversarial. Opposing Giuliani since his initial loosing 1989 campaign against David Dinkins, unions never warmed to the mayor. His years in office were often marked by strident clashes with union representatives. For cutting the number of public employees, for refusing to acquiesce in the union’s efforts to use the city budget as a personal ATM, and for turning over many over the city’s poorly managed institutions to non-profits and private organizations, Giuliani earned the unions’ enduring scorn. The Times’ story confirms that little has changed in the unions’ attitudes. But it tells us little about the merits of the mayor’s leadership.
The Times’ subsequent strike against Giuliani, in June, proved equally unenlightening. This time, the paper gave space to a story speculating that Giuliani’s support for abortion rights would alienate religious believers -- one of the few times, surely, that the paper has felt compelled to stand up for the pro-life side of the debate. Unlike the Times’ earlier effort, however, the story proved more damaging, tapping as it did into long-held conservative suspicions of the mayor’s record on a politically fraught issue. The campaign was knocked on the defensive.
Yet Giuliani survived the blowback -- at least for the time being. On June 27, he gave a speech at Regent University, the Christian college founded by evangelist Pat Robertson, where he received an enthusiastic reception from an audience clearly at odds with the candidate on abortion. Of course, there will remain those who will never accept Giuliani’s pro-choice position, and who wince at his assertion that he will not make opposition to Roe v. Wade a “litmus test” for his Supreme Court nominees. But evidence that this has hurt him politically is conspicuously thin. A recent Gallup poll found that among Republicans who describe themselves as “born again or evangelical,” 69 percent say they would support Giuliani as the GOP’s nominee; no other candidate receives comparable support from these voters. Nor have campaign coffers suffered. In the first week of July, the Giuliani campaign edged out the rest of the GOP field in the money race, taking in $17 million in the second quarter. If the Times had hoped to drive a wedge between hizzoner and his base, it had clearly failed.
So it tried again. In July, the paper published by far the least scrupulous of its attacks on Giuliani. Longtime observers of the mayor would have instantly recognized it as a classic in the category of “Giuliani the racist” articles, one of many the paper published throughout the 1990s. The latest article rehearsed the theme that Giuliani had, allegedly, alienated all blacks regardless of political persuasion -- a racism in effect if not intent. Lest anyone miss the not-so-subtle point, the paper strongly implied that Giuliani had a “black problem.” Oddly, given such a judicious assessment of his political past, the candidate declined to respond to “discuss his views on race” with the Times.
Giuliani’s record, though, speaks for itself. During his time in office, New York’s homicide rate, once among the worst in the country, plummeted from over 2,000 annually to less than 600. It was a revolutionary change from the 1980s, when homicide was the leading cause of death among black and Hispanic youth in New York. The charge of “racism” also sat uneasily with the benefits that the black community saw under Giuliani. Following the success of the 1996 welfare reform act, Giuliani introduced a “workfare” program that cut the number of welfare recipients, many of them minorities, from nearly 1.1 million under David Dinkins to less than 480, 000 by the time he exited office in 2001. For the first time, low-income blacks were offered a way out of poverty.
None of these improvements deterred demagogues like Al Sharpton for denouncing the “racist” Giuliani and accusing him of making “war on black America.” Most unforgivable to the race-baiters was Giuliani’s refusal to treat blacks as a persecuted minority, entitled to the special treatment that implies. Beset by manufactured outrage, Giuliani refused to budge. “I don’t have a special message for any group,” he said at the time. “People in this city don’t need special things. They need more general things -- safety, jobs, education.” Safeguarding black lives, providing employment opportunities, and treating blacks as responsible individuals rather than wards of city bureaucrats -- therein lies the real legacy of race relations during the Giuliani era. Only on the pages of the Times could it be held up as proof of the mayor‘s “racism.”
To be sure, the Times’ grudge against Giuliani is long in the making. Fred Siegel, the author of The Prince and the City, a political biography of Giuliani as mayor, notes that the roots of the paper’s antagonism can be traced back to Giuliani’s reaction to the so-called Kummerfeld report. Commissioned by Mayor David Dinkins as a possible solution for trimming the city’s runaway budget deficit, the report was a near-caricature of liberal policymaking, calling for property and sales tax hikes and even backing a tax for movie and theater tickets. The New York Times loved it. In a December 1993 editorial, presented as advice for the newly elected Giuliani, the paper urged him to enact the report’s “intelligent, nonpartisan ideas.” Giuliani was less enthusiastic. He pointed out that the proposals to raise taxes would shrink the city’s tax base and cause irreparable economic damage in the long term. Then he suggested that it should be “thrown in the garbage.” It was a spirited rebuke to city’s political establishment and its main media organ. “The tensions between Giuliani and the Times crystallized at that moment,” Siegel told me. As the latest series of attacks suggests, they haven’t dissipated since.
It does not follow from all this that Giuliani is the ideal candidate to win the nomination. Though his credentials on the war on terrorism are impressive -- Giuliani was expelling Yasir Arafat from New York’s Lincoln Center at a time when most global leaders were extolling the PLO terror chief as a peacemaker -- his views on other issues deserve scrutiny. On immigration especially Giuliani has failed to distinguish himself. His refusal to comply with federal laws requiring that cities report the immigration status of illegal aliens convicted of crimes was among the most ill-considered policy moves of his mayoralty, and his opposition to the recent immigration “reform” bill, primarily on technical grounds, inspires little confidence that he has grasped the importance of the immigration issue. In short, there is plentiful warrant for skepticism of the Giuliani campaign. But if you want fair-minded coverage, as opposed to partisan score settling, don’t look to the New York Times.
Read entire article at FrontpageMag.com (Note: The original article includes links to the sources cited in the text.)
You would expect the New York Times to come down against Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, it’s a safe bet that American liberalism’s paper of record would find little to admire in any Republican candidate for the presidency. What you might not expect is that, months before primary season, the paper would commit its full resources to flinging dirt at the Republican candidate whose views, at least on social issues, most approximate its own.
Yet, in recent months, the Times on its front page has been waging all-out war against the former mayor. The opening salvo was launched in May, when the paper ran a piece airing allegations that Giuliani was responsible for the illnesses developed by emergency-response workers toiling at Ground Zero after September 11. The paper’s own reporting indicated that there was little substance to the accusations. For instance, in the days following the attacks, Giuliani stressed that emergency personnel were required to wear masks at Ground Zero as a precaution against contaminated air. The mayor’s department of health issued similar warnings. As recovery efforts stretched on, however, many, caught up in the frantic work of seeking out survivors, failed to comply with the cautions. Could the mayor have done more to make sure that safety procedures were followed? Possibly. But the complaints featured in the Times were not really about Giuliani’s post-911 leadership.
Rather, they signaled the revival of an older battle between the mayor and the city’s public employee unions. As a U.S. Attorney in the 1980s, Giuliani had made a name for himself by taking on mob influence in New York labor unions. Henceforth, his relations with organized labor would be adversarial. Opposing Giuliani since his initial loosing 1989 campaign against David Dinkins, unions never warmed to the mayor. His years in office were often marked by strident clashes with union representatives. For cutting the number of public employees, for refusing to acquiesce in the union’s efforts to use the city budget as a personal ATM, and for turning over many over the city’s poorly managed institutions to non-profits and private organizations, Giuliani earned the unions’ enduring scorn. The Times’ story confirms that little has changed in the unions’ attitudes. But it tells us little about the merits of the mayor’s leadership.
The Times’ subsequent strike against Giuliani, in June, proved equally unenlightening. This time, the paper gave space to a story speculating that Giuliani’s support for abortion rights would alienate religious believers -- one of the few times, surely, that the paper has felt compelled to stand up for the pro-life side of the debate. Unlike the Times’ earlier effort, however, the story proved more damaging, tapping as it did into long-held conservative suspicions of the mayor’s record on a politically fraught issue. The campaign was knocked on the defensive.
Yet Giuliani survived the blowback -- at least for the time being. On June 27, he gave a speech at Regent University, the Christian college founded by evangelist Pat Robertson, where he received an enthusiastic reception from an audience clearly at odds with the candidate on abortion. Of course, there will remain those who will never accept Giuliani’s pro-choice position, and who wince at his assertion that he will not make opposition to Roe v. Wade a “litmus test” for his Supreme Court nominees. But evidence that this has hurt him politically is conspicuously thin. A recent Gallup poll found that among Republicans who describe themselves as “born again or evangelical,” 69 percent say they would support Giuliani as the GOP’s nominee; no other candidate receives comparable support from these voters. Nor have campaign coffers suffered. In the first week of July, the Giuliani campaign edged out the rest of the GOP field in the money race, taking in $17 million in the second quarter. If the Times had hoped to drive a wedge between hizzoner and his base, it had clearly failed.
So it tried again. In July, the paper published by far the least scrupulous of its attacks on Giuliani. Longtime observers of the mayor would have instantly recognized it as a classic in the category of “Giuliani the racist” articles, one of many the paper published throughout the 1990s. The latest article rehearsed the theme that Giuliani had, allegedly, alienated all blacks regardless of political persuasion -- a racism in effect if not intent. Lest anyone miss the not-so-subtle point, the paper strongly implied that Giuliani had a “black problem.” Oddly, given such a judicious assessment of his political past, the candidate declined to respond to “discuss his views on race” with the Times.
Giuliani’s record, though, speaks for itself. During his time in office, New York’s homicide rate, once among the worst in the country, plummeted from over 2,000 annually to less than 600. It was a revolutionary change from the 1980s, when homicide was the leading cause of death among black and Hispanic youth in New York. The charge of “racism” also sat uneasily with the benefits that the black community saw under Giuliani. Following the success of the 1996 welfare reform act, Giuliani introduced a “workfare” program that cut the number of welfare recipients, many of them minorities, from nearly 1.1 million under David Dinkins to less than 480, 000 by the time he exited office in 2001. For the first time, low-income blacks were offered a way out of poverty.
None of these improvements deterred demagogues like Al Sharpton for denouncing the “racist” Giuliani and accusing him of making “war on black America.” Most unforgivable to the race-baiters was Giuliani’s refusal to treat blacks as a persecuted minority, entitled to the special treatment that implies. Beset by manufactured outrage, Giuliani refused to budge. “I don’t have a special message for any group,” he said at the time. “People in this city don’t need special things. They need more general things -- safety, jobs, education.” Safeguarding black lives, providing employment opportunities, and treating blacks as responsible individuals rather than wards of city bureaucrats -- therein lies the real legacy of race relations during the Giuliani era. Only on the pages of the Times could it be held up as proof of the mayor‘s “racism.”
To be sure, the Times’ grudge against Giuliani is long in the making. Fred Siegel, the author of The Prince and the City, a political biography of Giuliani as mayor, notes that the roots of the paper’s antagonism can be traced back to Giuliani’s reaction to the so-called Kummerfeld report. Commissioned by Mayor David Dinkins as a possible solution for trimming the city’s runaway budget deficit, the report was a near-caricature of liberal policymaking, calling for property and sales tax hikes and even backing a tax for movie and theater tickets. The New York Times loved it. In a December 1993 editorial, presented as advice for the newly elected Giuliani, the paper urged him to enact the report’s “intelligent, nonpartisan ideas.” Giuliani was less enthusiastic. He pointed out that the proposals to raise taxes would shrink the city’s tax base and cause irreparable economic damage in the long term. Then he suggested that it should be “thrown in the garbage.” It was a spirited rebuke to city’s political establishment and its main media organ. “The tensions between Giuliani and the Times crystallized at that moment,” Siegel told me. As the latest series of attacks suggests, they haven’t dissipated since.
It does not follow from all this that Giuliani is the ideal candidate to win the nomination. Though his credentials on the war on terrorism are impressive -- Giuliani was expelling Yasir Arafat from New York’s Lincoln Center at a time when most global leaders were extolling the PLO terror chief as a peacemaker -- his views on other issues deserve scrutiny. On immigration especially Giuliani has failed to distinguish himself. His refusal to comply with federal laws requiring that cities report the immigration status of illegal aliens convicted of crimes was among the most ill-considered policy moves of his mayoralty, and his opposition to the recent immigration “reform” bill, primarily on technical grounds, inspires little confidence that he has grasped the importance of the immigration issue. In short, there is plentiful warrant for skepticism of the Giuliani campaign. But if you want fair-minded coverage, as opposed to partisan score settling, don’t look to the New York Times.