Rudy's soulful exit
Giuliani opens his heart and leaves the Senate race. But Hillary
may have a tough time beating his heir
By Eric Pooley
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.
|