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Rudy's soulful exit

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Giuliani opens his heart and leaves the Senate race. But Hillary may have a tough time beating his heir

May 22, 2000
Web posted at: 3:31 p.m. EDT (1931 GMT)

The new york senate race this year was going to be the Clash of the Titans--Hillary vs. Rudy, no last names needed. So when one of the titans quit the contest last Friday, all the gas went out of the race, right?

Wrong. Rudy Giuliani's decision to drop out wasn't a huge surprise--the New York City mayor is battling prostate cancer and his wife just hired a fancy divorce lawyer--but it was a personal drama of operatic proportions, a thunderclap so loud that mere politics couldn't account for it. And Hillary Rodham Clinton may find that Giuliani's likely replacement, Long Island Congressman Rick Lazio, is a tougher opponent than Rudy would have been. Lazio is no titan, but he is young, genial, ethnic, Roman Catholic, suburban and unknown to most voters--just like George Pataki was when he whupped a titan named Mario Cuomo in New York's 1994 gubernatorial race. "Hillary was better off against Rudy," says Hank Sheinkopf, a New York media consultant who worked for Clinton-Gore in 1996. "His high negatives balanced hers. Lazio doesn't have negatives--and if she attacks him before anyone figures out who he is, she'll look like a bully. This is gonna be good."

For a little while last Friday, however, what mattered most in New York wasn't the state of the campaign. It was the state of a man's soul--a man who has often been accused of lacking one. Giuliani has always enjoyed playing the crime-fighting superhero, but he has, famously, been a cold and merciless crusader--a bane to squeegee pests, jaywalkers, homeless people, welfare moms, police-shooting victims and city-council Democrats. But Giuliani's shell cracked open on Friday, when he announced his decision. His sharpness and arrogance fell away, and he was revealed as a man shaken to his core by cancer--someone who has learned what it's like to be vulnerable and frightened, someone who now regrets his oft-displayed lack of sympathy for the vulnerable and frightened in the poorest precincts of his city. In other words, the mayor discovered that there's room for personal growth behind Fiorello La Guardia's desk in city hall. "I think I understand myself a lot better," he said, and he made it clear he didn't like everything he saw. He vowed to make himself a "better mayor" and a "better person," and he dedicated his last 18 months in office to bridging the city's racial divide, overcoming "some of the barriers that, um, maybe I placed there."

Some black leaders say Giuliani would need far more than 18 months to rebuild the bridges he has burned. And it is true that New York has seen New Rudys before--they appeared at his mayoral victory rallies in 1993 and 1997 but vanished soon after. This New Rudy, though, seemed different, heartfelt and free of calculation. Giuliani was remaking himself while taking himself out of the race. He was hunting bigger game, slaying demons of the heart, unearthing something more important than politics--and in so doing he was finding the voice that could have made him unbeatable had he stayed in. "If he had shown that kind of heart for the past two years, Rudy might have been deciding today whether to run for President or Vice President," says Representative Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat. Rudy without the rancor--what a concept.

There was plenty of rancor last Friday among New York's G.O.P. leaders, some of whom felt betrayed by Giuliani's decision. They have loathed him ever since he backed Cuomo against Pataki in 1994; now they feel vindicated and righteous in their anger. They believe Giuliani never wanted to make the Senate race, that he used the cancer as an excuse to get out. Worst of all, he took three long weeks to make up his mind. The RUDY! posters have already been printed for next week's state G.O.P. nominating convention in Buffalo; now they have to be shredded and replaced with placards that say RICK!

Lazio's signage may not be ready, but Lazio is. He spent the past year plotting a primary run against Giuliani, only to bow out when Pataki told him to. Now, the party elders agree, it is Rick's turn. He has close to $4 million in the bank, and given the Republican bile stirred up by Hillary, raising another $15 million or so won't be a problem. He hired a smart media guy in Mike Murphy, who was last seen riding shotgun on John McCain's Straight Talk Express. And since Lazio is close to the state Conservative Party boss, he's likely to get on that party's ballot line as well, which Giuliani wouldn't have been able to do--and that can be good for 275,000 votes in a statewide race.

On Saturday, Lazio launched his campaign, saying Hillary is "no more a New Democrat than she is a New Yorker." Then he grinned like a child seeking praise. Now 42, he grew up on Long Island, where he worked in his father's auto-parts store. After attending Vassar and American University Law School, he spent five years as a prosecutor, then jumped into politics--first as a county legislator, then, in 1992, in a race against Congressman Tom Downey, a Democrat who had represented the district for 18 years. Downey outspent Lazio 5 to 1, but Lazio beat him 53% to 47%.

Then came the Gingrich Revolution. Lazio allied himself with the leadership, signed Newt's Contract with America and voted for most of its provisions, including ones to cut education and Medicare funding. It's those kind of moves the Clinton campaign plans to hang around his neck. But Lazio's allies say he worked behind the scenes to soften some of the harsher Contract bills--increasing the child-care subsidy in the House G.O.P.'s 1995 welfare bill, for example, and working to save nutrition funding for seniors. And he wasn't a lockstep Newtie. He supported the assault-weapons ban and the Brady handgun-control bill, as well as Clinton's family-and-medical-leave act. He became a leader on public-housing reform, voted for gay and lesbian domestic-partner health benefits and executed a complicated straddle on abortion--nominally pro-choice but against federal funding and late-term abortions. He voted in favor of impeachment and managed to become an aide-de-camp to majority leader Dick Armey without being seen as an inflexible ideologue. For all these reasons, Lazio may be just the kind of innocuous package to attract voters who couldn't stomach Giuliani or Clinton. "He's a practical politician who prepared his image very carefully for a statewide race," says Ackerman, who represents the district next to Lazio's and counts him as a friend.

"Rick is a warm, fuzzy boy next door. He's huggable in a way Giuliani wasn't--until the mayor's transfiguration."

Last week in New York, every conversation came back to Rudy. The personal trumped the political. The New Rudy isn't going to chase any votes this year, but he will create an ongoing political spectacle that turns New York into a two-ring circus: Hillary and Rick going for the Senate in one ring, Rudy going for redemption in the next. But first, Giuliani needs to get past the cancer. The mayor still has not chosen a treatment, and the decision is clearly agonizing for him. Surgery to remove the prostate gland offers the best chance of eliminating the disease but carries a risk of impotence and incontinence. An alternative treatment--implanting tiny radioactive "seeds"--has less risk of side effects but doesn't always eradicate the cancer. "I find myself unable to make the treatment decision yet," Giuliani confessed Friday. After he grapples with that, he will have to figure out how to deliver on his vow to extend the good times to all the communities of New York City. In his very first appearance as mayor-elect, in 1993, Giuliani went to Harlem and asked the people there "to give me a chance to show in deeds rather than words my commitment to this community." His deeds failed him. Now he has one final chance to make good on that promise, and he seems to believe that this task matters more than the Senate race. It might be something his soul is telling him to do.


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Cover Date: May 29, 2000

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