- Aug 20, 2000
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I thought someone should make an effort.
Politics has lost its charm
Does America need a leader who can get things done? Is Rudy Giuliani that guy?
Politics has lost its charm
The core work of the Giuliani foreign policy advisors is to thrash out a coherent new foreign policy for the post-Bush era. That's the same work I do in
most of my other hours of the week: on this page, in other media and in the book I've just finished after three years work. We try to analyze problems and propose solutions.
But analysis and understanding are nothing without the ability to execute them effectively.
In the days when George Bush was more popular, many commentators compared him to Harry Truman: the fiery, argumentative president in place at the beginning of the Cold War. That was meant as a compliment, but it should be remembered that Truman ended his administration with the lowest popularity ratings in the history of the modern presidency. Truman suffered for many of the same reasons Bush is suffering now: the United States was mired in a protracted and inconclusive war (Korea then, Iraq now). Frustrated, Americans turned in 1952 to a leader who could get things done: Ike Eisenhower, the man who had presided over the single greatest public triumph of his time, the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Rudy Giuliani has proven himself the most successful public-sector executive of our time. In 1993, the year before he took office in New York, the city suffered 1,995 homicides. In 2001, his last year, the city suffered only 626, apart of course from the 9/11 terror attacks.
Giuliani was not riding a nationwide trend: Crime rates in New York descended radically more steeply than anywhere else. New York City is home to only about 2.5% of all Americans. Yet New York accounted for 15% of all the reductions in murder in the United States in the 1990s.
Of all the candidates running for president, Giuliani is the only one who can say: I accepted a public problem thought to be unsolveable -- and solved it. Then it was crime; now it is terrorism, war and the many domestic problems of the United States besides.
Does America need a leader who can get things done? Is Rudy Giuliani that guy?