Was Rudy Giuliani a jerk?
Yep. And a good thing, too.
The moderator of a Republican mayoral debate, smug as a bug in a rug, leveled the charge last week — provoking a sharp intake of breath in the room, but also laying a finger on a real problem with this year’s crop of candidates.
They’re too damned nice.
The thing is, to paraphrase the late Ed Koch-look-alike chicken farmer Frank Perdue, it takes a tough mayor to make — and to maintain — a tender city.
That is, it takes someone capable of glorious, world-class jerkdom when the circumstances require it. You know, like pinning the blame for crime on criminals, and insisting that New York City would no longer abide vagrant encampments and public urination.
The usual suspects went into a swoon, but Rudy didn’t care. He had a crocodile hide and superb instincts — and, besides, public urination is disgusting.
Everybody knew that, of course. Giuliani’s real sin wasn’t turning hypocrisy on its head, it was that he had rendered judgment in public. Back then, that was a major indiscretion; today, it’s grounds for impeachment from the body politic.
Giuliani insisted, most fundamentally, that New York City respect itself, which was impossible unless minimum standards were applied to public behavior — regarding crime mainly, but not just crime.
Because the approach necessarily involved rendering judgment, it bruised feelings, fueled media angst and eventually generated considerable Rudy fatigue.
Mike Bloomberg, while by no means a pea from the Giuliani pod, took judgment-based policy-making to new levels (enjoy that quart of Coke Classic while you can, boys and girls; tomorrow it goes bye-bye) — and he, too, catches copious grief for it.
He’s in Planned Parenthood’s crosshairs at the moment for sponsoring subway ads highlighting the profound link between teenage illegitimacy and consequent economic — and moral — poverty.
Of this, there has been no real doubt for decades. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan prophetically noted the phenomenon among black families in the early ’60s, and the sociologist Charles Murray squared the circle last year with his provocative — and convincing — “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.”
But Planned Parenthood is oblivious: “The latest NYC ad campaign creates stigma, hostility and negative public opinions about teen pregnancy and parenthood.”
So stigma and hostility — Mike Bloomberg’s judgmentalism — trump life-long, multi-generational poverty and despair.
It is to weep.
Still, the calendar is about to send Bloomberg packing, and so this relevant question arises: Who among his nicer-than-pie potential successors has the capacity to unhesitatingly knock heads?
To call BS when it matters?
To be a jerk?
To be a jerk about public safety — to face down the spurious ethnographic objections to proven practices like stop-and-frisk and anti-terrorism surveillance, and to state the obvious out loud: without safe streets, great cities can’t survive.
To be a jerk about municipal economics — to speak truth to powerful unions about the city’s inability to meet even its current wage, health-care and pension obligations, let alone to expand them.
To be a jerk when the activists come calling with demands for imposing anti-market social-services mandates on private businesses — “living” wages, paid sick leave and the like.
To be a jerk about high taxes. Especially about taxes, and their corrosive effect on job creation in a city that, for all its apparent prosperity, is still vexed by unreasonably high unemployment.
To be a jerk about public education — and the scorched-earth teachers-union opposition to even the most tepid efforts to reform the schools over the past 20 years.
This isn’t a prescription for endless confrontation, by the way. Both Giuliani and Bloomberg also accomplished a great deal with soft soap, even if few noticed it at the time.
Yet neither man hesitated to stand up for principle. They weren’t always right, and they often were obnoxious — righteous, sometimes joyful, jerks — but New York City prospered for it.
Some sign of that instinct in their potential successors would be welcome right now.
For the achievements of the past 20 years won’t maintain themselves, just as the challenges of the future will demand sound thinking, moral courage and — yes — a crocodile hide.
In other words, a jerk in City Hall.