TodayHow Rudy Carrie’d on in New York
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In the realm of political scandals, a single incident usually takes on the name of the person most closely involved. The Lewinsky and Craig scandals come to mind as examples.
Then there’s the long series of scandals that call for their own unique name, usually provided by the media. I’m thinking Watergate, Iran-Contra and Whitewater.
One might think the recent series of negative revelations involving Rudolph Giuliani might easily pass under the first-mentioned model of scandal naming. But since a large swath of the national media can’t mention Giuliani without appending “America’s mayor” to the reference, it appears that the other model must be followed here.
And that name, ginned up in the blogosphere over the past week: “Sex on the City,” an homage to the Candace Bushnell book and Sarah Jessica Parker sitcom based in Giuliani’s city.
By “on the city,” they mean that Gotham’s taxpayers picked up the tab for expenses relating to Giuliani’s assignations with Judith Nathan, back in the days when she was the married mayor’s mistress rather than his third wife and a first lady in waiting.
They would repair to the Hamptons with the NYPD in tow to provide “security,” then the expenses for such visits would be laundered through obscure city agencies like the city Loft Board and the Office For People With Disabilities to keep the information under wraps.
These were multiple-day trips that required a half-dozen cops to be fed and put up in hotels — and there are no cut-rate beds in the Hamptons.
Giuliani’s supporters cited his need for 24-hour security, but it turned out that the NYPD was providing a car and driver for Nathan even when she wasn’t with the mayor. And that the NYPD was providing her with someone to walk her dogs for her. And that Nathan was calling the police for car service for her friends even when she wasn’t traveling with them.
That resulted in the claim that threats had been made against Nathan. Though that very well may have been true, I doubt any of the hundreds of other New Yorkers in the same situation get police escorts everywhere they go.
The current Mrs. Giuliani, however, is not the star of “Sex on the City.” Her hubby, Mr. Big, is. And the plot is less about the travails of single women in the big city than about a former mayor and lobbyist who wants to be president.
And it’s not his experience as a lobbyist he’s touting to caucus-goers in Iowa and small-town voters in New Hampshire, but his leadership as mayor. How he turned Times Square from the red-light district into Disneyland and banished the squeegee-men from the sidewalks. And of course, 9/11.
Talk about last week’s revelations, though, and Giuliani’s spokespeople call it “old news.”
Well, it’s the same-aged news as all his mayoral decisions. Actually, it’s newer, since the invoice-laundering and mistress-squiring at city expense wasn’t discovered until he was long out of office.
So if we’re supposed to judge Giuliani’s leadership on such “old news” as Times Square and his square-jawed determination on Sept. 11, 2001, then we should be able to add these new pieces to the puzzle as well, even though they darken the sunny picture his campaign paints of him.
Remember what the biggest national news in the latter years of the Giuliani administration was? Hint: I mentioned her name in the first paragraph of this essay.
You don’t think Giuliani’s friends, relatives and associates weren’t telling him Monica Lewinsky jokes in those days? Why wouldn’t they, when few of them knew about his mistress?
And yet this incident appears to have had no effect on his thought processes, despite the fact he was planning to run for higher office.
The Giuliani who ordered security for his girlfriend as well as his wife and kids is Exhibit A for the most basic kind of official corruption — the kind based on personal entitlement. The wires are full of stories about small-town mayors who commandeer police cars to take their wives to the mall or hold their kids’ birthday parties in city hall, expensing the party favors to the municipality.
Making your city’s police department essentially run interference for your extramarital affairs is a good indication that you’re a little too comfortable with power. And before you rush to e-mail me about the other scandal mentioned here, let me remind you that Lewinsky never had her own Secret Service detail.
Ironically, the impulses that make a person think such long-established rules don’t apply to him are the dark side of such coveted traits as “decisive” and “unshakeable.” These were considered to be strong points of the current president in 2000, though nobody ever thought to ask what it was he might be “decisive” or “unshakable” about. Now we know, unfortunately.
So let’s be a bit more specific this time around, before we grant the star of “Sex on the City” the lead in a new series, “Bush Administration: The Next Generation.”
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Francis Volpe’s e-mail address is:
fvolpe@cumberlink.com
