I‘m in a room with 2,000 New Yorkers, none of whom knows who Frank Rich is. It’s about 9 p.m. at Rudy Giuliani’s midtown victory celebration, but the crowd is area-code 718. These are the bridgeand-tunnel people from Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, where few people read the columnists on the New York Times op-ed page and sometimes the local newsdealer doesn’t even carry the paper.
Security is tight for this event, and my theory is they hired night-club bouncers and told them to reverse their criteria. Guys with brown shirts, brown suits, and black leather jackets? Let them in. Girls in spangled heels, with too much eyeliner and evening gowns in the tres Atlantic City style? In. Young men with moussed-back hair and New York Rangers jerseys? In. Some of these people stand nervously against the wall, as if the Manhattan taste police are going to swoop down and evict anybody with the wrong accent, no neck, and too much back hair.
The place looks like an Italian bar mitzvah, with rabbis all about and old men with Italian-American lapel pins looking for chairs so they can rest their feet. The ethnic groups travel in packs, like teenagers cruising at the mall. A group of six Hispanic politicos swings by in one direction, a clutch of Pakistanis swoops past in the other, four black nationalists in African garb are milling about on the left, some Chinese women are chatting on the right. This really is a gorgeous mosaic. You can go years without seeing so many Reagan Democrats in one place.
It’s good to have these people in power again. If you know New York only from the newspapers or Seinfeld or the cop shows, this is the New York you don’t see. You wouldn’t want a city governed strictly according to the preferences of the insurance salesman from Bensonhurst, but these people have been right about a lot of things over the years. They knew that urban riots weren’t justified rebellions. They knew that law and order wasn’t a code word for racism. They knew all along that there was something screwy about ceding control of public places to panhandlers, pushers, and crazies. These people kept alive some sensible ideas that Manhattanites are only lately rediscovering.
They wait patiently for Giuliani’s appearance (Manhattanites pronounce his name Julie-Onnie; the people in this room pronounce it Julie-Annie). The MC, the actor Ron Silver, invites the crowd to watch a five-minute campaign film. It shows the mayor in scene after scene with smiling schoolkids. The music is mushy New Age. Rudy the Mobbuster is being advertised as Rudy the Purple Dinosaur. Frank Luntz, Giuliani’s political consultant, has brought his saccharine style with him from Washington. Giuliani spent the final weeks of the campaign talking about caring, cuddliness, and compassion. The sweet-Rudy ploy worked with the TV reporters — he got glowing coverage for his softer style. But the movie is doing nothing for the people in this room.
Then the mayor comes down for his victory speech and immediately starts kissing men. He wasn’t kissing men the way some Manhattan men kiss men. He was kissing big fat Italian men on the cheeks. This was belly-to-belly, secure-in-my-masculinity, grab-you-by-the-face, razor-stubble kissing.
Suddenly it’s clear that Rudy Giuliani is not just a politician who appeals to Reagan Democrats. He is a Reagan Democrat. His wife, who is scarcely seen with him and who does not attend this election-night rally, seems to have social ambitions. She wants to be an actress and a TV star. But while Giuliani has intense political ambitions, he seems to have no interest in social-climbing his way to Park Avenue. We think of him as the worldly Wall Street prosecutor with squads of Yale assistants. But Giuliani can be stiff and formal with Manhattanites. Tonight he is open, fluid, and ebullient with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd.
Rudy Giuliani is probably more rooted in his neighborhood than we cosmopolitans have realized. This has implications for how he is going to conduct himself over the next four years. Busting crime and even battling the mob are prototypical Reagan Democrat activities. Giuliani goes into his second term vowing to declare war on drugs — that too will go down well in the boroughs. But surely the central challenge for Giuliani now is to revive New York’s economy. Among other things this will mean taking on the municipal unions, whose cushy work rules and pay scales lead directly to New York’s incredible tax rates. The union leaders Giuliani will have to crush, though, are bridge-and-tunnel people. Many of them are up partying in Giuliani’s suite on the 44th floor. Giuliani has shown that he is willing to take on his base when it is good for the city — he is in the midst of a bruising battle with the heads of the police union. But this is an agenda even more challenging than the first-term crime agenda.
Giuliani’s status as a prototypical Reagan Democrat also has implications for his career after City Hall. Most people laugh when you suggest that a pro- choice, pro-affirmative-action, pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican like Rudy can have a future outside of New York City. But most Republicans who take these socially liberal positions are snobs when it comes to the social conservatives. One suspects that it’s the snobbery as much as the positions that drives mainstream conservatives up the wall.
Giuliani is the opposite of a snob. And while his politics are socially liberal, he is no urbane relativist. To hear him talk about the porn merchants and the gamblers is to sense how much he is revolted by indecent behavior, by people who aren’t tough on themselves and who don’t work honestly and hard. The one genuinely moving moment of the night comes in the midst of his victory speech. He has already touted the crime figures and New York’s new spirit and all that. But then he says that of all the things about the city that make him proud, there is one thing that makes him proudest (he is shouting at this point). He declares it was when the federal government tried to shut off benefits to hard-working legal immigrants, and New York stood up to fight. “And we won!” he exults. He goes on to praise the legal immigrants who put in those incredible hours on the job. He is bellowing into the microphone, and the white ethnics all around me are cheering and roaring. It is unexpected and unaffected emotion.
These are the ethnics who got castigated as Archie Bunkers. But Election Night, it’s obvious how unfair that scorn was. You can take these people out, you just can’t dress them up.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
