It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  “Monroe, Monroe, Monroe, Monroe, you are a prejudiced, bigoted person. I have nothing to do with racists of any kind. I have nothing to do with people who cause fires using the fuel of anti-Semitism [Al Sharpton once called a Jewish merchant in Harlem a “white interloper”; later, the merchant’s store was torched]. The mere fact that you don’t want to deal with it [the question about Al Sharpton] tells me you don’t want to be fair and impartial. The Republican Party has a problem with some people wanting to be involved with it who appeal to racism. The Democratic Party has people like that in it also. You’ve got to be willing to stand up against both of them. I want nothing to do with racism, and I can be clear and unambiguous about it whether it’s Republicans or Democrats. But I think you are unable to do that, Monroe. I think you use racism as a partisan tool. Now we’ll take a short break and be right back.”

  Monroe had asked Giuliani a legitimate question. Not only refusing to provide an answer, Giuliani had denounced Monroe for even asking. If Monroe in Staten Island hung up infuriated, he would not have been the first New Yorker to feel

  that way after an encounter with the mayor.

  * * *

  Born to a working-class Italian family in Brooklyn in 1944, Rudolph Giuliani attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, then got a bachelor’s degree from Manhattan College and a law degree from New York University. At the age of twenty-six, he joined the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and, three years later, he found himself assigned to the narcotics unit, where it was his job to go after some of the most despicable people in New York, drug dealers. Less than a decade later, at the age of thirty-nine, Giuliani was himself appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In his seven years in the position, he won 4,152 convictions, sending to prison still more despicable people—murderers, mafiosi, white-collar criminals—while suffering only twenty-five reversals. Giuliani’s experience as a prosecutor taught him to see life simply, as a battle between the forces of good and evil. If he sometimes overreacts, treating ordinary citizens as suspects, as he did Monroe, New Yorkers appear willing to indulge him. They recognize that by 1993, when Giuliani was elected, the city needed an avenger. The mayor’s temper, his high-handedness, his penchant for going on the attack—all have earned him a dedicated corps of critics. Yet to many New Yorkers, these very traits prove that he is the right man for the job.

  Since taking office Giuliani has cut the crime rate in half, the murder rate by 70 percent. True, the crime rate has fallen in other cities during the same period. But it has fallen further in New York, making the city, according to FBI statistics, the safest city of more than one million inhabitants in the country. * Giuliani has enacted more than $2.3 billion in tax reductions, cutting the personal income tax, the commercial rent tax, the hotel occupancy tax, and the sales tax on clothing. Giuliani has reduced New York City’s welfare rolls by half a million, a number so big that if all the people the mayor has moved off welfare established a city of their own, it would be the twenty-seventh biggest in the nation. Since Giuliani took office New York City has created 325,000 new jobs and seen its unemployment rate drop by almost half. If tangible accomplishments represent the measure of a politician, then Giuliani may be the most effective politician in the nation. Yet Giuliani himself is proudest of something that cannot be seen or quantified. It is the new way New Yorkers think about their city.

  “New Yorkers used to assume several things about the city,” Giuliani said after the radio show. He slouched in an armchair across from his desk, his legs stretched out, his arms behind his head. “They assumed that it had to be dangerous, that it had to be dirty, that we were a welfare capital and we would stay that way, and that the city was unmanageable. That thinking is gone now.”

  Raised a Democrat, Giuliani explained, he became a Republican for three reasons. The first was the expansion of the welfare state. “I recognized that the alignment of the parties was changing during the 1970s, and I did not agree with the dependency philosophy that the Democratic Party was embracing, particularly in New York City. It seemed to me that the whole concept of entitlement was very, very, very destructive.”

  The second reason was foreign policy. “I thought that the Democratic Party, at least as represented by George McGovern and his kind of thinking, did not have an appropriate appreciation of how strong America has to be to preserve freedom and democracy,” Giuliani said. “The idea that we should demilitarize, that we should underfund the military—they just didn’t recognize how dangerous the world is.

  “The other thing I started to feel,” Giuliani said, explaining his third reason for joining the GOP, “was that the lack of political competition was killing cities. I could see that this decrepit Democratic Party, which was all that existed in cities, was able to count on everybody’s votes and not have to do anything for voters in return.”

  In 1976, Giuliani voted for Gerald Ford, the first vote he had ever cast for a Republican. He has been a Republican ever since.

  Giuliani makes many members of his own party uneasy, the more so now that he is running for the Senate. Some, particularly those close to New York’s Republican governor, George Pataki, cannot forget 1994, when Pataki was running for governor against the Democratic incumbent, Mario Cuomo. Giuliani crossed party lines to endorse Cuomo. (Asked about it now, all Giuliani will do is shrug and say, “I made a mistake.”) Other Republicans object to Giuliani because he is pro-choice, pro–gun control, and, as his radio paean to the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade made clear, pro–gay rights. They would vote against him if they could. But they can’t. In New York politics, Giuliani is as conservative a candidate as they’re likely to get.

  In any event fixating upon Giuliani’s liberal social positions misses a larger point. His central principles are inherently conservative. Limited government. Public order. Individual responsibility. He has demonstrated that acting upon these principles can transform even New York. In so doing, Giuliani has rendered Republicans a larger service than most of them realize. I didn’t realize it myself until I wandered the streets of downtown Manhattan, looking for squeegee men.

  Journal entry:

  When I lived in New York City in 1990, everyone I knew believed that New York, already dirty and dangerous, was bound to get even worse, slowly decaying. The United States might defeat Communism—the Berlin Wall had fallen just a year before—but cleaning up New York would prove beyond our ken.

  Everyone had his favorite complaint. The garbage that piled up on street corners when the sanitation department failed to collect it. The countless porn shops clustered around Times Square. The drugs and violence in the city’s schools (a joke in my neighborhood: What’s the dress code at Julia Richman High? Skirts for the girls, handcuffs for the boys). My own favorite complaint was the squeegee men.

  The squeegee men operated an extortion racket. When you stopped your car at a light, they scrawled some soap on your windshield, squirted some water over the soap, then scraped your windshield with a squeegee, often making it dirtier, not cleaner. Either you rolled down your window to pay them a couple of bucks or they snapped off one of your wipers. In one sense, the squeegee men represented nothing but a petty annoyance—what was a couple of bucks from time to time? Yet in another, they proved profoundly disturbing, demonstrating that the city was lawless. If the NYPD couldn’t control a few punks in the street, what could it control?

  After interviewing the mayor this morning, I took the subway to the Canal Street stop, got out, and walked the streets near the Holland Tunnel, a favorite spot for the squeegee men, who would move among the cars that were backed up at the entrance. I knew the squeegee men were gone—I’d read that much. I still wanted to see it for myself. I walked for twenty minutes. There wasn’t a squeegee man in sight.

  I may have been overreacting, I grant you. But I felt the same elation I felt the day the Berlin Wall came down. Something good had happened that only a few years before w
ould have been unthinkable.

  Different as they are, George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani each solves a problem for the Republican Party. As we have seen, George W. Bush demonstrates how the GOP can win. If he can ward off John McCain, Bush stands at least a chance of carrying the voters inside the Finkelstein Box while appealing to those outside it.

  Rudolph Giuliani solves a problem that is even worse. Ever since Ronald Reagan succeeded in achieving so much of his agenda, the GOP has suffered from a certain aimlessness—the very aimlessness that I commented on when I began this journey on, so to speak, Mount Reagan. The Berlin Wall is down. Free markets and democracy have swept the world. Our economy is booming. What is left for Republicans to do? But if Giuliani can cut crime in New York, Republicans can cut crime anywhere in the nation. If he can restore a sense of order and pride to New York, Republicans can restore order and pride to any city or town. You see my point. Giuliani has made the unthinkable thinkable. If millions of American children are trapped in mediocre public schools, why shouldn’t Republicans enact voucher programs to get them out? If the federal government still spends an amount equal to a full one fifth of the GDP, why shouldn’t Republicans scale the federal government back? Or reform the tax code? Or privatize Social Security? Giuliani himself might dissent from a social agenda, but why shouldn’t Republicans reduce abortions? Or strengthen the institution of marriage?

  To my mind, Rudolph Giuliani and the revival of New York do indeed rank right up there with Ronald Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Giuliani, like Reagan, has shown Republicans that their principles are more powerful than even they themselves often suppose.

  * * *

  As I was about to leave his office, Mayor Giuliani said there was something he wanted me to see. He stood, walked to his desk, riffled among some papers for a moment, then found what he wanted and picked it up. He showed me a bound report. “This is hilarious,” Giuliani said. “You’ll love it.”

  The federal government, he explained, had just conducted a study of Yankee Stadium, checking it for accessibility to the disabled. The inspectors had found some three thousand instances in which Yankee Stadium failed to meet federal standards.

  “Listen to this stuff,” Giuliani said. He read one item after another. The path of travel out of the Yankee dugout was accessible only by steps, not a ramp, making it impossible to get a wheelchair onto the field. The dressing bench in the Yankee locker room was forty-five inches long by sixteen inches deep instead of the required forty-eight inches long by twenty-four inches deep. The toilets in the locker room had a seat height of sixteen inches, one inch below the required seventeen inches. The spout of the drinking fountain in the weight room was forty-two inches off the floor instead of the required thirty-six inches.

  On and on Giuliani read, howling with laughter. The federal bureaucrats had failed to see that although many duties can indeed be performed by disabled people, including, as Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated, the duties of president, some duties lie outside the grasp of the disabled by their very nature, including the duties of the New York Yankees.

  “The urinals are too high,” Giuliani continued, cackling. “The toilet paper dispenser is incorrectly mounted on the back wall of the toilet. Do you believe anybody does this? I mean, people get paid to do this.”

  Giuliani tossed the report back onto his desk.

  “The federal government sent people here from Washington to do this. This is the stupidity they use. They are pointy-headed stupid morons. This is ridiculous! This is ridiculous!”

  Trying to imagine my fellow Republican, Rudolph Giuliani, as a member of the Senate, I made my way down the marble steps of city hall, then past the men and equipment engaged in restoring City Hall Park. As I stepped back onto the street, I was still smiling.

  Epilogue

  LOVE?

  Journal entry:

  By now I’ve traveled to New York City, Jersey City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Fresno, and elsewhere. What strikes me as odd is that so many people I’d never met—people who had no good reason to invite me into their offices—have been perfectly happy to talk to me. All I had to say was that I was writing a book about the Republican Party. They responded with the kind of warmth you might accord to a fraternity brother.

  Why? It’s not as if belonging to the Republican Party created all that intimate a bond among us. The GOP counts tens of millions of Americans as members. * It administers no entrance examination or membership oath, instead accepting everyone who wants to join. Unlike political parties in Europe, the GOP requires no dues. (Various branches of the GOP—the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, state party organizations, and so on—will send you junk mail, asking for contributions, but you remain equally Republican whether you toss the solicitations in the wastebasket, as I do, or respond to each by writing a check.) Nor does the GOP impose any discipline upon its members. In London recently, a prominent member of the Conservative Party, Lord Archer, admitted perjuring himself in a court of law. The Conservative Party is submitting Lord Archer to an ethics investigation. Depending upon the findings of the investigation, it might expel him. A Republican could admit the same crime—and there would be nothing the GOP could do. Investigate a member? Expel him? The GOP has no mechanism for doing either.

  The GOP doesn’t even have any authoritative way of articulating its positions. Every four years, it is true, a committee convenes to write the Republican platform. In a European political party, such a platform, or manifesto, as it is often called, would be considered a definitive statement of principles and aims, binding on the party’s officeholders and candidates. But if you want to know how seriously Republicans take the GOP platform, just look at Bob Dole. When he ran for president in 1996, the platform included several planks that Dole disliked. Dole dealt with the platform by ignoring it. “The platform?” he would huff whenever a reporter started to ask him about a controversial plank. “Never read it.”

  Huge, open to anyone, amorphous, utterly undisciplined. Why would anyone even want to belong to such an organization? Yet people spoke to me for one reason. The GOP mattered to them.

  I set out on this journey to discover what the Republican Party stands for now that Ronald Reagan is gone. But the journey took on a life of its own, teaching me lessons I hadn’t expected. One was that the very way I had approached the GOP, expecting to be able to capture it by coming up with a list of positions, was mistaken. I had the wrong scope or scale in mind. The Grand Old Party proved bigger and older—grander—than I had thought.

  Of course the GOP takes positions on the issues. But it has a prior stand, an overarching position that it has held throughout its existence. As one of the two major parties, the GOP helps to keep American politics both stable and vital. In power, it unites disparate elements behind its agenda. Out of power, it serves as a stout critic of the Democratic Party while providing a base from which politicians eager to defeat the Democrats can develop new programs. With a membership made up of particular ethnic, religious, regional, and socioeconomic groups, it has an almost tribal character, giving tens of millions of Americans a sense of personal involvement—a stake—in politics. It is one thing to watch as a disinterested observer while politicians win or lose this or that election. It is another to believe that their victories and defeats reflect upon your own tribe.

  A source of stability. A base from which to put forward new programs. A link between ordinary Americans and the political process. Many Republicans don’t realize this themselves—I certainly didn’t—but before it stands for anything else, the Republican Party stands for the success of American democracy.

  To repeat the question I asked at the outset, Who are these people? What does George W. Bush have in common with Rudolph Giuliani, Haley Barbour with David Brady, Michael Medved with Jane Dee Hull, Justin Adams with Newt Gingrich? A discernible set of principles? Or now that the Cold War is over—and Ronald Reagan has departed fr
om the scene—does the GOP amount to nothing more than a tribal affiliation intermixed with a scattering of exiles from the other party? Is its only animating principle, like that of the Whig Party before it, enmity toward Democrats?

  Nearly every person with whom I spoke was able to articulate his reasons for being a Republican. A belief in individual responsibility. The conviction that any government that absorbs a full one fifth of the goods and services its citizens produce is too big and too intrusive. The desire to see American military might remain unassailable, even in the post-Cold War world. An eagerness to bring market forces to bear on social problems, introducing voucher programs, for example, to improve our schools, or replacing welfare with workfare. From Fresno to Jersey City, I found, Republicans hold in common a clear set of principles. It is true that on the social issues, Republicans are divided. Yet the main body of the party—the GOP that lies inside the Finkelstein Box—is pro-life, opposes special rights for gays, and supports the institution of heterosexual marriage. While the GOP makes room for a wide divergence of opinion on these matters, it is nevertheless accurate to say that the GOP as a whole stands for traditional morality.

  Do the GOP’s principles make any difference? Pat Buchanan doubts it. Buchanan says he bolted the Republican Party because its agenda had become all but indistinguishable from that of the Democratic Party. In one sense, Buchanan is merely restating a truism of political science, namely that the two major political parties in the United States are much closer together than political parties in Europe, which run from monarchist to Communist. Yet at the same time Buchanan has a more immediate point. Republicans are in less of a revolutionary mood than they were when Ronald Reagan ran for office in 1980. The differences between George W. Bush and John McCain on the one hand and Al Gore on the other are far smaller than were the differences between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.