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'It's George Bush with brains'
21/11/2007 12:33 - (SA)
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| Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani greets supporters after speaking to the media in Chicago. (M Spencer Green, AP) |
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New York - Republican Rudy Giuliani vows
to be tough on terror, chooses advisers who want to bomb Iran
and doesn't think pretending to drown prisoners is torture.
Add to those views a reputation for being combative, and
Giuliani often evokes the word "scary" from opponents who find the tough-guy image that served him so well after the September 11 attacks now a cause for concern as he seeks the US
presidency.
Type the word "scary" and names of Republican candidates for president into a leading database of articles. The name of the former New York mayor will get the most hits.
"He is a scary guy," said Jerome Hauer, who ran the city's Office of Emergency Management for Giuliani. "He was probably one of the more divisive mayors the city has ever seen.
"People in this country should be very frightened of Rudy
because he is not going to bring the country together," Hauer added. "Who knows who he'd pick wars with?"
When New Yorkers reminisce about Giuliani, they tend to
recall his contentious moments - threatening to pull funding
from a museum over a controversial exhibit, disclosing sealed
records of an unarmed man killed by police, insulting a city
resident over whether ferrets should be pets, trying to place a
homeless shelter in the district of a councilman he disliked or
surrounding City Hall with barricades and barriers.
But voters nationwide, at this stage of the November 2008
presidential contest, seem to be thinking more about his calm
and compassion after the deadly attacks in 2001 enough to
anoint him the Republican front-runner.
"What they see is a guy that they heard was superb on 9/11,
and he was," said former New York Mayor Ed Koch.
But, Koch added: "They don't know him. He's a really
smooth, charming person. When you talk to him, you don't become aware from what he says to you of his history in New York City. I honestly believe on 9/10 he couldn't have been elected dogcatcher."
Koch said he supported Giuliani twice for mayor but,
because of what he sees as his authoritarian and thin-skinned
temperament, does no longer.
He has a "knee-jerk need to antagonize critics and people
he perceives as enemies," said Rob Polner, editor of America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York. "He's
perceived as being not only punitive but being a bully, picking
on weak targets and being unpredictable."
Battling squeegee men
Supporters admire Giuliani's tenacity, an attribute many
welcome when the nation is at war. They recall him taming a
city many felt was out of control, battling so-called squeegee
men who would wrest money from drivers by squirting car
windows, sweeping porn shops from Times Square and guiding the
charge against crime.
"He's scary? I think they don't know him to make a
statement like that," said Guy Molinari, a former US
congressman and state co-chairperson of the Giuliani campaign.
"If he was going to get things done, as mayor of New York
City he had to come out strong. Obviously when he did, he was
going to make enemies," Molinari said.
Giuliani's critics take issue with his choice of foreign
policy advisers that includes neoconservative Norman Podhoretz,
who is outspoken on a need to bomb Iran, and Daniel Pipes, who
advocates singling out Muslims at airport security points.
Worrisome to them too are Giuliani's calls for a larger
US military and his refusal to call waterboarding, which
simulates drowning, a form of torture.
"This is one dangerous man: it's George Bush with brains," wrote Michael Tomasky, editor of the Guardian Online.
Online, the blogging community uses similar descriptions.
"There is a sense Rudy Giuliani isn't just wrong but is
genuinely scary. Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson or John McCain
are wrong, and they're perceived as putting the country on the wrong track, but Rudy Giuliani is genuinely scary," said Steve Benen, editor of The Carpetbagger Report.
- Reuters
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