GIULIANI

In a small backstage room, Giuliani sketched out a few opti ons with his aides and decided within seconds to boot Arafat. U.N. official Gillian Sorensen (wife of Ted) protested it would be awfully embarrassing. ” Enough!” Giuliani snapped when she started repeating herself. He had already dispatched Mastro to tell Arafat to leave. The PLO leader sat silently as Mastro told him he was not welcome, but a PLO aide was incredulous. “Do you know who you are talking to?” he asked. Several minutes later the PLO delegation decamped.

The State Department, the White House, the New York media, and former mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins protested. Koch called Giuliani a “horse’s ass” who had disgraced the city. The New York Times suggested that Giuliani was crassly trying to curry favor with the Jewish vote.

The Times was wrong. Once Giuliani had decided not to invite Arafat to the concert, he could not have backed down. It’s not in his nature. Giuliani sees himself as someone who never backs down, and he’s proud of it.

In the two years since he was elected mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani has waged a relentless pressure campaign against those who violate his sense of decency. He has forced the Mafia from the Fulton Fish Market, which it had dominated for six decades. Last month he oversaw passage of an anti- pornography bill that largely pushed porn merchants out of Times Square and residential neighborhoods. He removed the squeegee men, who used to menace drivers trapped at red lights under the guise of washing their windows. He has expanded a workfare program so that now he has 24,000 people cleaning up parks, schools, and other public spaces.

The results have been dramatic. The city’s crime rate fell an astonishing 32 percent in 1994, with robbery down 22 percent. And in the first nine months of this year the murder rate declined an additional 30 percent. New York is now the safest city in America with a population over 1 million. The streets and parks are cleaner. Aggressive panhandling has been curtailed. The homeless now tend to spend their days sitting on park benches, whereas before they were likely to be found sleeping on the sidewalk. The Giuliani administration and the police department under Commissioner William Bratton have taken huge strides to make New York a more civil place.

“Community” and “civil society” are the hottest social-science topics around Washington, inside think tanks, and on the nation’s campuses. In these quarters, the debate has focused on moral breakdown, illegitimacy, the decline of trust, and other deep social trends. Social critics talk about the need for “mediating institutions” and the corrosive effects of rap music, talk radio, and trash TV.

Giuliani’s approach to civil society has none of this. He ignores the culture war. And his success in New York suggests that maybe you don’t need a moral reawakening or a religious revival to see remarkable improvements in civil society. Maybe you can make a startling difference merely by instituting a few mundane acts of good government that restore civic authority over the streets. While it’s interesting to wonder if Americans bowl alone, perhaps the more immediate task is to make sure decent people feel comfortable hanging outside the bowling alley late into the night.

The Giuliani approach is based on suppression of the anti-social. It’s a style of government concerned with the traditional subjects of political philosophy: power, force, and authority. And individualism, in the form of a political leader with few ties to established parties or interests.

For decades, cities were governed by political machines. The corruption they engendered led to the professionalization of city management, with urban planners dominant from the mid-1940s onward. Now prosecutors hold sway. Four of the best mayors in the country — Ed Rendell of Philadelphia, Richard Daley of Chicago, Stephen Goldsmith of Indianapolis, and Giuliani — made their bones as crime busters. And Giuliani is the epitome of the prosecutorial type.

Giuliani says that the most important thing he learned as a prosecutor was the ability to make decisions quickly. Another way of putting it is that he became comfortable with power. To be a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as he was from 1983 to 1989, is to come as close to possessing absolute power as a democratic system allows. You have the power to ruin people merely by investigating them. You have control over one of the most rigorously selected teams of prosecutors in the country. You are barely subjected to press oversight (unless you court it), and if someone leaks one of your internal documents about an ongoing investigation, he is breaking the law.

Giuliani has an evident taste for power, and he uses it with gusto — a gusto that, pointed in the wrong direction, can do real harm. He directed law-enforce ment officials to march into Kidder, Peabody and other brokerage firms, handcuf f alleged insider traders in front of their peers, and cart them off to jail. He seemed unfazed when the charges were later dropped.

Giuliani’s actions as mayor have been variations on a theme: Give me the ball, let me control it, hold me responsible. He has waged a relentless and often messy campaign to exercise more power over the city. And he has used the power he has accumulated to stomp on the forces that threaten the social fabric. It’s been a two-front war. He has worked with Commissioner Bratton to establish authority over the streets. And, in a lonely battle, he is fighting to exert authority over a municipal system that in the course of 50 years had become bloated, unfocused, and decrepit.

To establish authority over the streets, Giuliani and Bratton drew on two social science theories. First, they cite Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s observation that America has been defining deviancy down, lowering its standards of tolerable public activity. And they are indebted to the broken- window theory developed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling — that if a broken window goes unfixed, people feel free to vandalize the whole building.

While some argued that the police should focus on major crimes, Giuliani saw the small eyesores — graffiti on a train, garbage on an open plot of land, or aggressive panhandling on a thoroughfare — as evidence of government weakness. “When people see these things, and see that they don’t get fixed,” he says, ” then over a period of time citizens get the impression that no one’s in charge. That undermines the social fabric.”

One of Giuliani’s first acts as mayor was to go after the squeegee men. In fact, there were only about 190 of them, and they were not violent, but they loomed large in the psychology of the city. Their elimination has become the most discussed symbol of New York’s regeneration.

He went after the Mafia even though its control of the Fulton Fish Market doesn’t have much effect on New Yorkers. The market is a series of buildings in lower Manhattan, at which more than $ 1 billion worth of fish is sold each year to metropolitan-area restaurants and wholesalers. The Genovese family’s vigorish made fish slightly more expensive in restaurants, but many of the firms that bought and sold within the market were more afraid of the anti- Mafia disruption than upset by the costs of continued mob control. Nonetheless, the Mafia domination of the fish market was an affront to civic authority. When the market’s key building was destroyed in an arson fire two days after the Giuliani initiative, the mayor redoubled his efforts. This was, after all, a direct challenge to his power and could not go unanswered.

Within the police department, precinct commanders now have the power to go after prostitution, public urination, the sale of marijuana, the sale of alcohol to minors, and cars that use massive stereo equipment to disturb the peace. Statistics are now updated daily so that precinct commanders can see which blocks are emerging as crime zones. People who don’t show up for their court dates are more likely to be tracked down.

These campaigns against the smaller violations have had an effect on major crime. Eighth Street in Greenwich Village had become a sleazy gathering point. Stores were beginning to close early. Now a walk down that street is much less menacing.

New York is benefiting from a nationwide drop in crime. But the city’s gains are due only partly to demographics. Its declines have been up to six times greater than the national average.

The mayor’s policies to improve the quality of life have been remarkably free of controversy. Indeed, the entire New York experience might suggest that the nation isn’t in such advanced moral decay. People may watch trash TV in the daytime with whatever fantasy part of the brain such activity occupies, but in real life, even New Yorkers do not have an anything-goes ethos. On the liberal Upper West Side of Manhattan, and in Greenwich Village, people support the Giuliani/Bratton measures. I used to know a woman who lived off Tompkins Square Park who would complain bitterly when the homeless defecated in her vestibule. But when the police came in to remove the homeless back in 1989, she joined a riot against the cops, energized by ideological zeal. People don’t do that anymore.

These days nobody makes a fuss when Bratton tells panhandlers to “get off drugs, get off the booze, get off your ass, and get a job.” On a call-in show late last month, a student at one of the city colleges complained to Giuliani about a small tuition hike. Giuliani told her to get part-time work and to stop complaining because average taxpayers were massively subsidizing her education. There were no irate calls in protest.

The anti-pornography measure that passed last month succeeded after years of failed attempts. Ed Koch and other experienced city fathers were deeply skeptic al of its chances. But, except from the pornographers themselves, there was lit tle opposition. A few leftists sti ll equate efforts to squash bestiality magazines today with philistine efforts to suppress Ulysses 60 years ago. But the measure, shepherded through the laborious regulatory process by City Planning Chairman Joseph B. Rose, passed easily through the Democratic city council to city-wide applause.

On pornography, graffti, homelessness, and a range of other issues, the consensus has shifted away from self-expression to the imposition of civic order. Urban policy in New York merely needed to catch up with cultural gains. Giuliani is no philosopher king who inspires a moral revival. He’s simply bullheaded enough to bust through the political inertia and bring policy up to date with the social consensus. Democrats are correct to point out that many of the policing and workfare measures that Giuliani celebrates were actually started, in less ambitious form, in the Dinkins administration.

Meanwhile, Giuliani’s bid to gain greater control over city government itself has been even more aggressive, and far messier. The administration’s self-image is of a band of courageous fighters taking on a political establishment that has been entrenched since the New Deal. “New York needed somebody who didn’t come out of what was a pretty rotten political system,” Giuliani says of his 1993 victory in the mayor’s race, when he became the first Republican in Gracie Mansion since John Lindsay departed two decades before.

When Giuliani talks about the New York City government, he describes a system of mutual indulgences in which each interest will fiercely defend its accumulated privileges: a fire department that will organize a hostile media campaign to cow a reformist fire commissioner; a police union that will use its pull in Albany to thwart effciency reform; an educational system that is rotten through and through. (And the police and fire departments are Giuliani’s friends.)

Many of his victories have been gained through sheer force of will. He pushed through a merger of the transit and housing police with the NYPD, a reform that had been needlessly foiled for decades. He largely prevailed in bloody fights with the city council, reining in a $ 2.3 billion deficit and reducing the city workforce by 15,000 jobs.

It’s been a series of battles, feuds, and conflicts. And since nothing he does can go unaccompanied by a scrap, he’s even feuded for credit with police commissioner Bratton; Ed Koch predicts that the relationship between the two is so poisoned that Bratton will quit within a year.

Giuliani’s most long-standing struggle has been to gain control of the city’s dysfunctional education system. He struggled bitterly with his own schools chancellor, Raymond Cortines. Giuliani hired Cortines, who is socially conservative, but soon became convinced that Cortines had allowed himself to be rolled by those under his command. Giuliani criticized him and pressured him to stand up for himself, calling Cortines “precious” and “a little victim.” Cortines is a thoughtful man willing to admit his own vulnerabilities. He earned immense sympathy in Manhattan, including an admiring profile in the $ INew Yorker, but clearly he had no place in Giuliani’s New York. Finally Cortines resigned, deciding that the assault on his dignity had gone far enough.

Giuliani’s goal has been to abolish the independent Board of Education and bring the schools more directly under his authority. It is typical of his brawls that even amidst the bad blood, he has made progress, so that now most political leaders have adopted versions of his view. It’s worth dwelling on his attitude toward the lone holdout, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, because it reveals how Giuliani plots strategy in these fights.

Silver recently sponsored an education summit, and Giuliani was subjected to oceanic criticism when he refused to go.

“Does it make sense to negotiate with [Silver] or does it make sense to wait until he’s in an area to make reasonable compromise?” Giuliani asks. ” He’s not ready at this point. If I begin negotiating with him, I take the pressure off. It will appear as if he’s trying to make changes, and we’ll be in a semantic debate about whether he is or isn’t. That’s what he wants.”

Giuliani has raked Silver over the coals at press conferences. “He needs to be focused on or he’s never going to change. . . . And we’ve surrounded him pretty effectively. Four out of the five major players support my proposal to do away with the board. I think we’re going to get it.”

Giuliani does not move ahead by cooperation. He moves ahead by pressure and c onfrontation, especially since he sees himself as an outsider elected to revolu tionize the system. And he posits that the important thing is not to be liked, but to hold power, so that your opponents have to deal with you whether they wa nt to or not. “We had tremendous battles over the first budget,” he says. “The Times wrote that I had totally ruined my ability to work with the city coun ci l. I told them at the time their view was a joke. It was an over-reaction to today’s events. You got to have a little more wisdom. You got to see a few days down the line.”

Giuliani’s method is wildly unpopular with the political class. He and the press loathe each other. The press is so put off by the months of bad blood his feuds create, that it neglects the progress that emerges when Giuliani triumphs. A lot of the liberal distaste for him is aesthetic.

In conversation with journalists, politicos, and other observers, especially sympathetic ones, one is regaled with stories of Giuliani’s indulging his love of conflict, attacking good people, savaging those who deserve better. “If you only have a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail,” Manhattan’s leftist borough president Ruth Messinger says, condemning Giuliani’s style. It’s hard to talk about Giuliani without hearing the phrase “control freak.”

The problem with Giuliani’s Manhattan critics is that they want somebody with the Crossfire virility to clean up their streets but also with the $ IMacNeil-Lehrer manners they admire. In some ideal world such a person might exist, but in reality, most people have the faults of their virtues. And maybe like a fastball pitcher, Giuliani is more fearsome and effective for being occasionally wild.

In the days following the Arafat episode, Giuliani’s love of combat was on ample display. He was under attack from all quarters of the globe, but as he rode in his white van from event to event, he was energized and triumphant. He answered dozens of hostile questions from reporters and was excited when his communications director let him know, amidst a visit to a Manhattan primary school, that she’d received a call from CBS’s Face the Nation. (He ended up going on the ABC’s Brinkley show instead.)

The only critic who got under his skin was Ed Koch. “Koch is such a fake,” Giuliani muttered to himself in the elevator on the way to a noon TV interview. He was delighted when a staffer found a 1988 quotation in which Koch had branded Arafat a “murderer,” and he used the quotation to justify his move all day. In the evening, in the van on the way to the opening of the Broadway musical Victor/Victoria, he came back to Koch again. “I made exactly the same decision Ed Koch would have made if he were still sitting where I’m sitting,” he said. “He wants to be a critic because he can get more attention.”

Addressing the opening night Broadway audience, he scanned the crowd and joked, “I guess you can all stay.”

Giuliani is an anti-Clinton. He makes decisions quickly. Once he starts something, he finishes it. He knows who he is. He doesn’t feel the need to be loved. But he is not lovable even when it might help him. He drives away those who would be allies most of the time.

He’s much funnier than you might expect, but he’s not a storyteller or a showman. At the primary school just after the Arafat incident, he greeted an assembly of kids. Amid a sea of squirming second and third graders, he went on about the job-creating potential of the private sector and his efforts to make city contracting more efficient.

A loner, Giuliani will probably not leave a broad reform movement behind when his time in office expires. An attacker of a bad system, he has not been a dramatic policy innovator. Even sympathetic observers say that his economic and regulatory reforms have been modest.

But he is a remarkably successful mayor and a new kind of Republican. He takes liberal positions on abortion and gay rights. He endorsed the losing Democrat, Mario Cuomo, over the winning Republican, George Pataki, in the 1994 gubernatorial election. But he exemplifies the only style of conservatism that can survive right now in America’s big cities. To call him a Republican moderate, as if he were Sen. John Chafee, is to miss the point. He is far from moderate in his attitude toward civil society or the political system he inherited.

His success might give conservatives pause about their insistence on supporting candidates only if they rigorously adhere to a set of conservative policy positions. In the 1993 mayor’s race, a few nationally known conservatives campaigned for George Marlin, running on the Conservative party line. That was incredibly foolish. Marlin got 1 percent of the vote. Giuliani won by a mere 2.5 percentage points over Dinkins. If Marlin had made a stronger showing, Giuliani would not be mayor today and the city would be infinitely worse off.

Giuliani is also a bracing presence in a country that is much concerned with community and civil society. The national discussion about community is often warm, fuzzy, and pointless.

Giuliani reminds us that communities are made possible by leaders who can mai ntain authority and, in this way, control streets and uphold community standard s of decency. Making tough speeches in the culture war is fine, but there’s gre ater toughness in a politician who, while lackin g ideological rigor, takes on the disasters of the last 50 years of urban policy, and prevails more often than anyone could have imagined in his wildest dreams.

by David Brooks