The Taming of a Senator

With Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign managing to entangle itself in its own feet while running in place, New Yorkers find themselves returning to the question of whether or not Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has precisely the right temperament for the Senate--a deliberative body in which the acceptable responses to a colleague's disagreeing with you have traditionally not included trying to have a homeless shelter put in his neighborhood.

Giuliani's attempt last year to put a homeless shelter in the district of an uncooperative councilman eventually fizzled, but this fall alone city hall has cut off funds from a museum whose paintings the mayor found offensive, torpedoed the federal grants of an AIDS service organization whose protest tactics irritated the mayor, and informed some state legislators who voted against the city's position on a tax bill that they would not be permitted on the stand at the Yankees ticker-tape parade. (The first two actions were reversed by courts on First Amendment grounds; the barred legislators did not go to court to test the proposition that standing on the platform like a big shot is a constitutionally protected form of expression.) At this point, New Yorkers would not be surprised to hear that someone who took a position contrary to the mayor's in a late-night discussion of how a Jack Dempsey-Rocky Marciano fight would turn out had awakened the next morning to find a municipal water-treatment plant being built on his block.

The Senate, of course, is not completely lacking in opportunities for petty vindictiveness on the schoolyard level. In fact, Jesse Helms has carved out a specialty in just that sort of thing, the way some other Senators have made themselves masters of farm policy or defense appropriations. But the arsenal of retaliatory weapons is rather thin. Expecting Giuliani to operate in the Senate, some New Yorkers think, is like asking a saloon brawler to conduct his business in a place that lacks both barstools and pool cues.

Actually, any job Giuliani might take after he leaves city hall would require an adjustment in the way he behaves. If one of your partners in a law firm criticizes your litigation strategy during a meeting, after all, you're not normally in a position to have him thrown out of his office or even to arrange for the custodial staff to discontinue the collection of his trash.

In the Senate, Giuliani would also have to cope with a tradition that frowns on personal slurs. The mayor is deeply committed to personal slurs. He characterizes anybody who disagrees with him as an irredeemably corrupt human being who holds opinions no rational person would countenance. If Giuliani were faced with a prohibition on such language, he might be forced to claim the protection of the First Amendment for himself.

The crunch could come on his first bill. Judging from his style in New York, he would refer to colleagues who spoke against it as idiotic or disgusting or sick--even if they'd presented cogent arguments against legislation that would grant Senators, as a matter of personal privilege, the right to put homeless shelters in other people's neighborhoods.

The Taming of a Senator

By CALVIN TRILLIN

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Cover Date: November 29, 1999