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« Back to Rating Rudy, Part Two main page    Transcript for: Rating Rudy, Part TwoTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1324 GIULIANI, Pt. 2 FEED DATE: September 8, 2005 Fred Siegel Opening Billboard: Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. WATTENBERG: Hello I’m Ben Wattenberg. In the awful days after September 11th, Americans were inspired by the bold leadership of the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. But prior to 9/11 he was both loved and hated, even though New York had experienced a renaissance under his administration. What was the secret to his success? What were his mistakes? What can we learn that might help other American cities? To find out, Think Tank is joined by Fred Siegel, professor at the Cooper Union and author of 'Prince of the City, Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life.' The topic before the house: rating Rudy, part two, this week on Think Tank. WATTENBERG: Fred Siegel, welcome back to Think Tank for... SIEGEL: Thanks for having me, Ben. WATTENBERG: ...part two of discussion of Rudy Giuliani’s New York. You wrote in your book that at the time Giuliani became mayor, it required 64 permits to build a new building and that Giuliani compared it to a third world city. Is that... SIEGEL: He would compare it to a third world city; he would compare it to an east European city. That’s right... WATTENBERG: Under communism. SIEGEL: Under communism. You know, the joke about New York is that New York in the 1930s was the only part of the Soviet Union where you could debate freely. Giuliani’s approach to – approach to business was to make it easier for small to midsized businesses to operate; to reduce the mob tax. An ordinary small business was paying a mob tax in terms of garbage costs, in terms of crime costs. By reducing those costs he hoped that businesses – the smaller and midsized businesses could flourish and that’s exactly what happened. WATTENBERG: And the mob played for keeps. I mean, the Godfather where you end up with a dead horse in your bed, I mean, people were killed for challenging the mob. SIEGEL: There’s a chapter in the book about Rudy Washington and Wilbur Chapman. Rudy Washington, an African-American deputy mayor; Wilbur Chapman, an African-American police captain. They go into the Fulton Fish Market, a mob stronghold, and they’re trying to clean it up and there’s a dramatic scene at one point. The two of them are surrounded by guys with fishhooks. And Washington has a cell phone and he calls out and he says, 'Someone’s going to die here tonight.' Fortunately... WATTENBERG: A fishhook is like a longshoreman’s... SIEGEL: A longshoreman’s grappling hook. It could cut right through you. Fortunately no one died that night, but it was very, very rough. Mayors had tried to do these kinds of things before. They tried to clean up 125th Street. They tried to clean up the Fulton Fish Market. They’d always backed off. Giuliani did not back off and the people around him didn’t back off. WATTENBERG: From the time he took office to the time he left, what was the percentage drop-off of violent crime? Do you have the numbers handy? SIEGEL: It’s about sixty – it’s about a sixty to seventy – it depends on the crime. It’s between sixty and eighty percent drop in violent crime depending on the category. WATTENBERG: And many of the - or at least percentage wise, many of them murders. SIEGEL: Many of them murders. The most important drop is stranger murder. In other words, murder within families is much harder to deal with, or murder between people who know each other. But the crime that produces the most fear is being murdered by a stranger; someone you don’t know. That drops off dramatically; almost ninety percent. WATTENBERG: He lowered taxes? SIEGEL: Not as much as you’d think. He lowers taxes in his first term and then that sort of stalls. He does lower taxes somewhat. His biggest tax cut is really the reduction in crime; the reduction in crime - in garbage hauling costs. WATTENBERG: He tried to reduce that. SIEGEL: He does try to reduce taxes. He does reduce taxes. He’s the first mayor since the Great Depression to actually reduce a budget from one year to the next. WATTENBERG: Let’s move on to welfare. You have a datum in your book that of Newark, New Jersey residents who are on welfare, twenty-three percent of them also got New York City welfare checks. SIEGEL: It was so easy. It was very easy to get on welfare. One of the great tragedies of modern urban life is that fact that in 1968 liberal mayor John Lindsay doubled the welfare roles. WATTENBERG: Who you – who you abhor. SIEGEL: Who I abhor. Who doubles the welfare roles in the midst of the greatest economic boom in American history; at a time when the black male unemployment rate is four percent. Shunting people off into marginality for generations. What Giuliani – much of what Giuliani does is to undo what Lindsay had done before him. WATTENBERG: You have one other citation. And again, these are exceptions, but – I guess, I assume - but you cite the case of one New York City woman on welfare for seventy-three fictitious children under fifteen fictitious names. I mean, that... SIEGEL: But this is not a racial thing. Russian Jews... WATTENBERG: No, no. I... SIEGEL: Russian Jews arrive in America and they realize -- what are they good at in the Soviet Union? Manipulating the bureaucracy. They realize that you can get all sorts of people social benefits in the family even though you’re working. The big thing here is that when you insist that people pick up the welfare check themselves, people who work stop coming, stop collecting welfare. It produces a tremendous drop-off right away without any... WATTENBERG: Some of the really simple things in other words. SIEGEL: Without any – and people had tried this in the past but then there had been such hostility from the social service people, from the racial demagogues that mayors had always backed off. But there’s a wonderful case, Ben. Welfare breaks out into the open with Giuliani with the case of Herbert Steed, a white guy who owns a mansion on Long Island; a luxury condo on the east side and a fleet of Bentleys. He gets caught scamming a group of African tourists and it’s discovered he’s also on welfare in Queens. And it was too easy. It was so easy no one could imagine that they were going to get caught by this. WATTENBERG: Did the National 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which President Clinton signed and he said he’s going to fix it later and Vice President Gore approved of it. Now Senator Hillary Clinton, I believe, approved of it. Did that work? SIEGEL: It did but it didn’t have an enormous effect in New York because New York was already engaged in major... New York had to engage in welfare reform. When Giuliani came into office the city was broke and one out of every seven New Yorkers, 1.1 million people were on welfare. It simply couldn’t be afforded. WATTENBERG: Now, we mentioned in passing immigration: there’s a whole other case that’s made that what really saved New York was the influx of some very hardworking immigrant groups. Could you name some of them and validate that, or not? SIEGEL: I think there’s some truth to that. People from the Caribbean; people from Eastern Europe. There’s a considerable Polish migration to New York; Mexican migration into New York. The trouble with attributing the city’s revival to this, though... WATTENBERG: And they work hard. SIEGEL: They were very hard. The trouble with attributing the city’s revival to this is they’ve been coming in large numbers since the ’70s. There’d been no revival. WATTENBERG: Right. SIEGEL: They – obviously they were an important part of the revival. They repopulate neighborhoods; they bring energy; Russians in Brighton Beach. They were an important element but they weren’t what made the difference. What made the difference is that the city – there was once again the sense the city was governable. That you – people wanted to be in New York. WATTENBERG: I have a little game I play with cabdrivers both in Washington and New York, probably ninety percent of whom are immigrants; you can tell from their accent, from all over the world. And I say, 'What do you think about America?' And I try to count the number of words until you hear, quotes, 'opportunity' and quotes, 'hard work'. That’s what you get here, isn’t it? SIEGEL: Yes. WATTENBERG: That – for all the many flaws. SIEGEL: It true. But I also live a few blocks away from some of the people who were 9/11 hijackers. And that’s the downside of immigration in New York. That it’s – because it’s an open city, it’s also a vulnerable city. WATTENBERG: Okay. Another item. What we used to call City College now called CUNY, City University of New York. Once the crown jewels of the free univer – it was free if you had a certain test. I think you have to have an eighty... SIEGEL: Eighty-five out of eighty... WATTENBERG: ...percent average in high school. Not wildly high but you had to... And then they decided to make it open enrollment; that anybody who graduated could go. What happened, what have they done now? It’s a great story. I mean, it’s a... SIEGEL: Here again, there was the riot ideology. The threat was if City University didn’t open its doors to everyone there would be riots. The campus would be trashed. WATTENBERG: That’s what was said. SIEGEL: That’s what was said and that’s what produces open admissions. There’s a man who’s close to Giuliani named Herman Badillo, the city’s first Puerto Rican Congressman; first borough president. Herman Badillo... WATTENBERG: Still thinking of running for President, by the way – for mayor, isn’t he? SIEGEL: Uh, no I think he’s finally given up on it. But many times – a guy who should have been elected mayor in 1969, but wasn’t. WATTENBERG: Good man. SIEGEL: Very good man. Herman Badillo makes – was a graduate of City University - makes the reform, the revival of City University his crusade. Giuliani backs him up. Badillo’s point is that without standards, a degree is worthless. Furthermore, Badillo sees that because you can get in to City University without any effort it undermines the high schools. Why work hard in high school if you’re guaranteed a place in college? And that what happens is we’re simply cycling people through. People graduate from high school knowing nothing. They go on to college, know very little, drop out. This is a great loss to the city. So what Badillo goes on – begins to crusade for higher standards. And he succeeds. WATTENBERG: Higher standards to get into... SIEGEL: To get into and to stay into the City University. This rebounds to the benefit of the high schools, and City University today is attracting top-notch students once again. WATTENBERG: You quote the late Senator Moynihan - it’s a very fascinating line – this way, quotes, 'Liberalism faltered when it turned out it could not cope with truth. It’s rewarded articulation of moral purpose more than the achievement of practical good.' That’s really what you had in New York. And I think, and I think you think, part of the liberal disease that if you say the right things that’s all you have to do. You don’t have to do anything. Nothing has to happen. SIEGEL: Liberalism became expressive. It was my – people’s way of saying, 'I’m a good person', 'I’m in favor of X, Y and Z.' Whether that was ever accomplished or not was another matter. Liberalism went utopian in the 1960s and has never recovered. By saying it went utopian, it ignored the underside of human nature. It ignored questions of self-interest, of the formed characters of evil. And so it was constantly taken advantage of. The city - you could take advantage of the city by not obeying the laws, by stealing from the city in terms of welfare. You could get a college degree, the idea was, without having to know anything. That couldn’t stand the test of reality over time. WATTENBERG: You cite in your book a poll – I don’t know if it’s a focus group or a general survey – taken out in Canarsie, which is out in Brooklyn, one of the outer boroughs, asking which words the respondents would associate with liberalism. And I guess the leading words are profligacy, spinelessness, masochism, elitism, softness, irresponsibility and sanctimonious. Yes, sanctimonious. Is that about what’s happened? SIEGEL: The key thing is that liberals became very smug and self-satisfied. Things that weren’t – things were failing they said because Washington wasn’t compassionate enough. The rest of the country wasn’t good enough. The people in the outer boroughs were too ignorant. So what you had is a kind of alliance, and this is important to understand contemporary politics in America. New York City was the first place where liberalism was involved in a top down alliance. Very wealthy people got to demonstrate their moral virtue by supporting higher taxes, which they could easily afford, and poor people receiving public benefits or public sector workers living off the public sector create a kind of alliance. The people left out of this alliance are the people making those comments. That’s the broad middle class. WATTENBERG: Now, looking forward a little bit, people are talking about Giuliani running for the Presidency in 2008. I don’t believe that we – or that he might be appointed as Vice President by whoever does get nominated. I don’t believe we’ve ever had an Italo-American – big word – at the top or the second slot of a Presidential ticket. Mondale had Geraldine Ferraro as... and unfortunately it turned out her husband I guess was involved with the mob, or so it was alleged. SIEGEL: I don’t think it was the mob; it was just corruption. WATTENBERG: But it –- it was corruption, yes. But do you think that would hurt? That there might still be some anti-Italian feeling in this country, or that’s long gone? SIEGEL: I don’t know if it’s long gone but I think the guy that took down the mob in so many different areas, it’s going to be hard to pin any stereotype on him. The thing about Giuliani is I think much of what happens to him as a Presidential candidate will be determined by the larger environment. If there are more Londons, if there are more terrorist attacks in major cities, he will be a very, very strong candidate. WATTENBERG: So you think he could win? SIEGEL: If the circumstances were right. WATTENBERG: Now you are a member of a group called the Democratic Leadership Council. You’re not actually a member because the only real members are elected office holders, but there are... SIEGEL: I work for the think tank, The Progressive Policy Institute, which is the – attached to them. WATTENBERG: Right. If you had a choice between voting for a republican like Rudy Giuliani or some moderate democrat, who would you vote for? You don’t have to answer this question... SIEGEL: I’d have to know – if Joe Lieberman had the republican – excuse me - had the democratic nomination this time, I would have supported Joe Lieberman. WATTENBERG: Yes. SIEGEL: The key here is the danger – the great danger for the Democratic Party is having so long been the party of criminal rights it’s now in danger of becoming the party of terrorist rights. If that happens, if people associate them with this, they will be in the wilderness for a long time. Or even if they do win the Presidency, it will be very hard for them to govern. WATTENBERG: That is a trump card. When you say so and so is soft on crime, game’s over. SIEGEL: Game’s over. On a national level. Absolutely. WATTENBERG: Or on a local level, anywhere. And with merit. I mean, you can’t – you can’t run a modern - any society with vast amounts of violent crime if people are - elderly people are afraid to go out at night. SIEGEL: What people – Giuliani’s strength is that he won’t shilly-shally around the question of terrorism; that he’ll take it head on. WATTENBERG: Continuing with the idea of Giuliani’s future, he has some other things in his record that would get republicans riled up. First of all, at one point he supported Governor Mario Cuomo over now Governor George Pataki. In other words, he broke party ranks. He is pro-choice in a party which allegedly thinks that is a great big issue. But he also apparently - again, likely under pressure - came out for this so-called partial birth abortion. How might he deal with that? SIEGEL: A lot of his positions on social issues are not deeply held. He adopted them in order to run for mayor in 1989. He knew in order to win in New York he had to change his position on abortion. He’d been anti-abortion before ’89 My suspicion is - and you already saw this in the 2000 Senate Campaign: he began to weaken his position on abort – change his position slightly on abortion - that you’re going to discover between now and 2008 he decides he’s really not in favor of partial birth abortion. So I think you’ll see some position shifting. Also the question of his personal life will come up and... WATTENBERG: Yes, I know, you devote one sentence to... I mean, he went through a divorce, a very sloppy divorce, while he was in office and then of course he was going to run against, or was thinking of running against now Senator Hillary Clinton and he developed prostate cancer, which I gather is probably okay. I mean... SIEGEL: It looks – it looks like he’s – medically he’s in good shape; he’s – and enormous energy. I think the best you can say about Giuliani’s personal life is that he’s a serial monogamist. WATTENBERG: (Chuckle) SIEGEL: And probably leave it at that. WATTENBERG: So you think that he will be criticized. On some things he will backtrack but there may be a constituency for so-called moderate republicans. Although he’s a – in his persona, so-called, he’s a tough guy. I mean, he’s a super tough guy. SIEGEL: I describe him as an immoderate centrist. WATTENBERG: Yes. That’s a good line. SIEGEL: Now it will depend –- If people feel that international terrorism is out of control, if they feel that we need a leader who’s capable of being ruthless when they have to be, Giuliani will have a very good shot at the republican nomination because those questions of terror will override, for most voters, other questions. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you this, Fred. Does what Rudy Giuliani did as mayor, is that replicable by other big city mayors? I’m thinking specifically of Richard Daley, the current mayor Chicago. And the new mayor of Los Angeles, who’s name I probably cannot... SIEGEL: Antonio Villaraigosa. WATTENBERG: Antonio Villaraigosa. Could they try the same reforms with the same results? SIEGEL: Well, in the case of Los Angeles and Antonio Villaraigosa, he has Bill Bratton, Giuliani’s former police commissioner. So we’re going to have an experiment out there. WATTENBERG: Villaraigosa does. SIEGEL: Villaraigosa. Now, the problem is that the Los Angeles LAPD is wildly under-funded, wildly understaffed. So the challenge there will be to get the money into the LAPD. In Chicago you have an interesting situation. Rich Daley is a great mayor. Chicago has undergone a wonderful period under Daley. But Daley’s great failing is crime. If you’re on State Street or Michigan Avenue, things are wonderful. But Chicago, a city with one- third the population of New York actually has more murders. And this is part of I think Giuliani’s most underappreciated achievement. He treated crime in Harlem and east New York the same way he treated crime in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights of Fifth Avenue. WATTENBERG: In closing, let me ask you this. What are the most important things we can learn about the Giuliani experience? SIEGEL: Ideas count and management counts. We haven’t talked about Giuliani’s... WATTENBERG: Ideas count. SIEGEL: Giuliani... WATTENBERG: He’s really an intellectual mayor in some sense. SIEGEL: He is much more intellectual, much more wonkish than people realize. He – when he lost for mayor in ’89, he spent the next four years studying city government. Right now you can be sure he’s studying the federal government, looking at how the agencies interact with each other. He’s a guy who not only read the City Charter once, not twice, but dozens of times. He knew the City Charter inside and out. The other thing is he wasn’t – he brought ideas and management together. He thought about what was wrong with the city and then he figured out how to implement the reform. Giuliani – every morning Giuliani would have an 8:00 meeting. All the commissioners were there. People were held accountable. The police commissioner had to... WATTENBERG: That’s a big word in your book is 'accountable'. SIEGEL: Accountability is central to Giuliani. People – sanitation commissioner had a problem with the fire department. It had to be settled right then and there. People had to know who was responsible for what. You know, a way to think about Giuliani is think about him as the guy at the baseball game who’s not only keeping – who not only has the box score to keep score, but he’s keeping score of every pitch. When he watches the Yankee games he’s managing the Yankees. This is a guy who’s a natural manager. WATTENBERG: I mean he’s called a control freak. SIEGEL: He’s a policy wonk; he’s a natural manager and he can work twenty hours a day. WATTENBERG: You mention in your book, Fred, that as well as Giuliani’s fine legacy, he also left a legacy of some big mistakes. And I wonder if you could iterate those for us. SIEGEL: Well, one of the biggest mistakes was firing Bill Bratton. Bill Bratton was an extraordinary innovator. The problem with Bratton and Giuliani is they were almost the same person. They were both natural leaders, ramrods, intellectuals in action. Giuliani had his people reading David Osborne’s Reinventing Government. Bratton had his people reading Champy’s Reengineering the Corporation. Giuliani should have been bigger. He should have allowed Bratton to continue. It’s Bratton’s leaving that produced many of the problems Giuliani has in race relations in his second term. When demagogues take advantage you want to forge – unforge an instance to try to set the city aflame. WATTENBERG: Yes, there’s an argument made about Giuliani that he’s such a publicity hound that he won’t give credit to other people. SIEGEL: I think the problem here is he should have been more willing to give Bratton all the credit he wanted. Bratton did an extraordinary job. WATTENBERG: Bratton was actually on the cover of Time Magazine. SIEGEL: Time Magazine. WATTENBERG: Without Giuliani. SIEGEL: Without Giuliani. And that – but I think more fundamentally is that these – when these two guys are in the same room, there’s no air for anyone else to breathe. WATTENBERG: (Chuckle) SIEGEL: The other mistake he made is he didn’t do enough, I think, to institutionalize his reforms outside of crime and welfare. One of the things – New York is a peculiar place. In good times we lock in spending we can’t afford the rest of the time, so New York has a violent business cycle. Giuliani in the second term thought about putting spending caps on the city budget. But he handled it in such an incompetent way it failed and the city is the poorer for it. WATTENBERG: Fred, is there something we did not mention that you would like to mention? SIEGEL: For many years people argues that cities were victims of vast structural forces beyond their control, that nothing could be done. You couldn’t hold David Dinkins accountable because Washington wasn’t generous enough because of changes in the national economy. What’s important about Giuliani is he showed that – ideas, if you bring ideas and management together, mayors, although they’re never completely masters of their own fate, are far more than corks on the ocean. WATTENBERG: Okay, on that note, Fred Siegel, thank you for joining us on Think Tank for a discussion of Rudy Giuliani’s New York. And thank you. Please, remember to send us your comments via e-mail, we think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 4455 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite C-100, Washington, DC 20008 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS online at pbs.org and please let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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