Rooting For Rudy

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“It is hereby declared to be the public policy of the city of New York to limit to no more than eight consecutive years the time elected officials can serve as mayor … so that elected representatives are ‘citizen representatives’ who are responsive to the needs of the people and are not career politicians.”

— Section 1137 of the New York City Charter

“Experience is the parent of wisdom,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1788 while arguing against the temptation of term limits upon the presidency. The New Yorker, whose gravesite is within two blocks of Ground Zero, could have articulated the same case in his hometown 200 years later.

The language of Section 1137 to the New York City Charter, excerpted above, is clear and unambiguous. Thirteen years ago, heeding less the Founding-era admonitions of Mr. Hamilton and more a wave of sentiment perhaps as old as the city itself, New York City voters outlawed lifetime politicians with the implementation of term limits in the metropolis.

As voters went to the polls on November 3, 1993, to pull the lever in favor of approving Section 1137, they also elected Rudolph Giuliani as the city’s 107th mayor. With the former prosecutor transformed from Mr. Giuliani to Mayor Giuliani by a victory of 50,000 votes in the electoral contest, few could have envisioned the impact that the city’s new chief executive and Section 1137 would come to have on a 16-acre site in downtown Manhattan.

Rarely do historians play what if? with the events of the past. Today, as the former mayor flirts with a run for the White House, pundits and commentators have been predicting his future. Perhaps, for a moment, it might be just as interesting to contemplate his past in speculation of what might have been. With the lack of leadership from all those involved in the development of the World Trade Center, it seems only appropriate to question the wisdom of Section 1137 and the prudence of the November 1993 city electorate.

During the waning months of Mayor Giuliani’s second term, as Ground Zero smoldered and the city was beginning to consider how we would need to deal with the site where two famous towers once stood, Mayor Giuliani offered to extend his term by three months. This extension would have ended his term not on January 1, 2002, as prescribed by the City Charter, but on April 1, 2002, as allowed by the state constitution.

The idea was seen as a power grab and effectively panned by the public. If we could not imagine three more months with America’s mayor, can we envision four more years of him?

What if, in essence, Mr. Giuliani had succeeded in November of 1993 and Section 1137 did not?

In this fictionalized scenario of what could have been a real-life drama, Mayor Giuliani senses post-9/11 that the city needs him more than the private sector and he decides to run for a third term. In the days between the Tuesday morning of the September 11 attacks and Election Day — also a Tuesday exactly eight weeks later — he mounts a come-from-nowhere victory to secure four more years leading City Hall.

Critics of Mayor Giuliani are inclined to dismiss his role on and after September 11 as more the product of hype than substance. In “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11,” authors Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins state that “when Rudy Giuliani looks back to September 11, he relies not upon the memory of the day itself, but on his memory of the telling of the tale.”

Yet others believe that there is no question the mayor would have gotten more accomplished at Ground Zero had Section 1137 not prevented him from seeking another term. “More would have been built by now or been on its way to being built,” Fred Siegel, a professor at Cooper Union and author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life,” said in a recent telephone interview.

Of the public officials involved, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, Governor Corzine of New Jersey, and billionaire developer Larry Silverstein, Mr. Siegel says in terms of lack of consensus on development plans, “it’s hard to understand quite what they think they are doing.”

Adding a third-term Mayor Giuliani to the equation — by effectively subtracting Section 1137 from the City Charter — Mr. Siegel argues that the city would have benefited from a participant “more focused” on the outcome of the development. “I think you would have gotten the memorial underway.You wouldn’t have had any of the museum business with the excesses there. None of that would have taken place,” Mr. Siegel said. “At the same time he wouldn’t have been burdened by Bloomberg’s plan to develop the West Side, which always gave downtown short shrift.”

Those critical of Rudy Giuliani have always pointed to the same flaws — impatience, arrogance, ruthlessness, and egotism. Supporters, however, would suggest that perhaps these characteristics make him an unusually effective leader.

From welfare reform to crime reduction to merging the three police departments that once patrolled the city (precinct, housing, and transit) to creating a Mayoral Office of Emergency Management, Mayor Giuliani took on his critics and got things done. In many cases, he completed objectives set by other mayoral predecessors, even though for each step of the way experts had been telling him these goals couldn’t be reached.

Dealing with these matters and many others, Mayor Giuliani prevailed, displaying a stubbornness that got him into trouble as often as it benefited him. Is there any doubt that, had he not been legally barred from serving four more years, Mr. Giuliani would have at least in some way gotten what he wanted? The ‘can-do, will-do’ attitude the mayor expressed on issue after issue during his eight year tenure as Gotham’s chief executive would have been helpful with our current woes about the fate of the sacred ground in downtown Manhattan.

On Rudy Giuliani’s desk during his two terms as mayor of what has been called the ‘ungovernable city’ was a sign that summed up in two simple words his leadership style: “I’m responsible.” With the five-year anniversary of 9/11 having already passed and an enormous scar remaining at Ground Zero, New Yorkers could certainly use somebody with that sign.

Mr. Coll contributes to The New York Sun and is an adjunct professor of history at Nassau and Suffolk Community Colleges.


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