Fred Siegel

 

Here's a lengthy interview with Rudy Giuliani adviser and biographer Fred Siegel up on Commentary magazine’s blog in which he explains that the former mayor is like Niccolo Machiavelli -- in a good way.

“Most of what Giuliani did was Machiavellian in the best sense. People forget Machiavelli believed in virtue. Not quite our version of virtue, but something akin to it.”

As for the guy who replaced Giuliani in City Hall, Siegel thinks he’s rich, and that’s about it.

“This is a man, Bloomberg, who has no major legislative success, either [in] Albany or Washington.”

Thumbing through a new "oral bigraphy" entitled Giuliani: Flawed or Flawless?, I came across this colorful quote from Al Sharpton about the former mayor's presidential bid:

"Rudy Giuliani is a power-hungry person. But I also think he knows that the honeymoon he's had with the media since 9/11 would be over if he ran and had to defend things that they don't now bring up. I think he's going to flirt with it; I think he's going to constantly keep himself in the papers because of his ego. But I don't think he'll ever pull the trigger because he knows that he will have to go back and explain everything - from Dorismond to Diallo to how his family separated - a lot of things he doesn't want to explain. It's better to live the reinvention than to have somebody move the veil and see that the wizard really isn't the wizard. So right now, he can lead all the media and the national pundits on the Yellow Brick Road. He'd better never let us get near the veil. I know what's back there; I've pierced it before."

Sharpton is hardly an objective judge, but it seems inarguable that the longer Giuliani goes forward as a serious candidate, the less effective his 9/11 credentials will be in winning him friendly treatment from the press outside of New York.

Arguing from the opposite point of view in the book is Giuliani's former adviser and biographer Fred Siegel, who says -- to sum up simplistically -- that Rudy has plenty of mayoral accomplishments that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but that a massive attack during the course of the presidential campaign wouldn't hurt his chances, either.

"The pre-9/11 accomplishments haven't gotten nearly enough attention because if you're going to look at how he'd govern as president, you have to look at how he governed as mayor. And so it's important to see how he operates - the kind of tight staff style he has, where he brings things together; he breaks down barriers. Giuliani is a student of government and I suspect that right now he's studying the federal government. Our vulnerabilities are considerable. If, as we're approaching the presidential campaign, you get something like today's [July 7, 2005] London bombing, that will give his campaign an enormous boost."

-- Azi Paybarah

With Rudy Giuliani inching closer to an official run for the presidency, it is worth taking a look at an area (besides the well-covered social issues) where the McCain camp clearly feels that he is vulnerable: foreign policy.

Last week, Newsday took a critical look at Rudy's foreign experience, and John McCain, on "This Week" basically said that while Giuliani was an American hero, he was the one with the credentials. Fred Malek, a key fund-raiser for Mr. Mccain made the same argument to me this week when he paid Giuliani the following back-handed compliment: "Rudy Giuliani has been a very successful mayor of our largest city. John McCain has not only served heroically in the military, but he has been a pivotal force of national security for a dozen years."

But Giuliani's supporters pushed back. Not only has Giuliani toured the world as a businessman, brokering international deals, but he has been vocal on his positions regarding Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.

Patrick Oxford, Giuliani's colleague at the Texas-based law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, told me that in the last few weeks alone, Giuliani has, as a representative of the law firm, met with energy leaders in Argentina, British Columbia and India. Barry Wynn, a fervent Giuliani supporter from South Carolina who acted as finance chair for President Bush's re-election campaign, added that Giuliani has repeatedly conducted business in both Eastern and Western Europe over the last year, and has met with business leaders in Asia at least three times. After the big donor meeting on Nov 15th at the "21" Club, Giuliani took off for India.

OK, fine, Giuliani has a gathered his fair share of frequent flier miles to foreign lands. But what about actual foreign policy?

Fred Siegel, author of Prince of the City, dismissed any suggestion that Giuliani was weak on foreign policy. Siegel pointed out that Giuliani had been stronger than most politicians in arguing that the United States needed to be tougher on Saudi Arabia in getting them to combat terrorism.

Giuliani has yet to dispel the doubts among national political players who are less familiar with him, but that might be more a question of timing than anything else. He has only just begun his roll-out, as with his recent announcement of an energy policy (diversification, with a greater dependence on nuclear energy) at a Manhattan Institute event.

So the "worldly, well traveled businessman" defense against foreign policy experience criticism is probably more of a place-holder until we get a more fully articulated vision as Giuliani's march towards official candidacy continues.

Iraq, anyone?

--Jason Horowitz

Fred Siegel, writing on the Manhattan Institute blog, says Mike Bloomberg's reaction to the Cory Lidle plane crash in midtown is "demonstrating the insouciance he made famous during the prolonged Queens blackout..."

During his weekly radio address, Bloomberg responded to the calls for tighter flight restrictions around NYC airspace:

The trouble is in our society, anytime anything goes wrong we add a level of checks. The trouble is every time you add another level of security it doesn't necessarily improve the level of security. It may very well make it so complex that it makes it less secure or less efficient or less reliable...Rushing to the microphone and saying you want to do something: leave it to the professionals.

-- Azi Paybarah

The analysis pieces are starting to meander in, and a couple you may have missed are Fred Siegel's harsh treatment of Freddy in The New Republic and Greg Sargent's partial lament of the result in The American Prospect.

Siegel sees a certain amount of justice in the defeat of a man whom, he thinks, cost the city's Democratic Party a shot at reform under a New-Democratized Mark Green.  read more »

"And so for the second time in four years, New York has elected a mediocre mayor," Siegel writes. "And for the second time in four years, Fernando Ferrer is to blame."

Sargent, meanwhile, thinks that Bloomberg's victory was in part over Giuliani and Koch, and laments what he sees as the failure of the city's elites to call Mike on his spending and to give Freddy a chance.

They've finished counting ballots in that East Harlem City Council race, and the winner is Melissa Mark-Viverito.

The former 1199 staffer prevailed over Felipe Luciano by 84 votes.

Mark-Viverito's win, along with Darlene Mealy's win in central Brooklyn, is a mark of how powerful the "progressive" wing of the labor movement, and its agent, the Working Families Party, have become in local races that have dropped off the radar for unorganized citizens and other interest groups.

Some commentators, notably Fred Siegel, are dismayed at this trend, but at this rate, the City Council may just have to declare itself an 1199 local one of these years.  read more »

Finally, there are some stirrings of a discussion of Rudy's pre-9/11 legacy which, love him or hate him, has been basically a footnote for the last few years.

In that spirit, this could be fun:  read more »

"On July 27, the Gotham Gazette Reading NYC Book Club will meet with to discuss Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life by Fred Siegel. Mr. Siegel will join us, as will Rob Polner, editor of America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York, a collection of writing about Giuliani due to be published that week.

If you were former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, you could be forgiven for thinking that New York, once the U  read more »

We've been wondering for a while about whether Anthony would benefit from embracing what we see as his inner Rudy: his reflex to defend outer-borough Catholics and Jews, and his willingness to offend liberals.

Already, Anthony's become something of a bogeyman for Middle East liberals, like Juan Cole, particularly over his calling for the firing of a Columbia professor. We saw him take some heat at a downtown Democratic club over his attack on New York Press for its pope jokes. And he has a fractionally different position from Mike on the smoking ban.

But unlike Rudy, Anthony always pulls back, the fantasy of a New York Times endorsement, perhaps, dancing in his eyes. He was careful to say that as Mayor, he would never have touched a copy of New York Press. We like to think that Rudy would have had the Department of Sanitation trash their boxes, and reveled in the scolding he took in the Times.

Anyway, we ran into Anthony last night at the book party for Fred Siegel's new Rudy book. He was the only Mayoral candidate, of course, there. We wandered when he was chatting with onetime Rudy advisor Richard Schwartz.  read more »

So perhaps he'll forget those polls showing that Democratic Primary voters rate Rudy slightly lower than Satan, and fully embrace that inner Rudy.

We suspect you'll be hearing a lot about Fred Siegel's new Rudy book, which we mentioned in our story this week. He's reading from it today at a Manhattan Institute event, and we suspect that's just the start of the kind of media blitz anything remotely connected to America's Mayor inspires.

Anyway, Siegel has a website, where you can see the eerie yellow cover art and get a taste of Siegel's argument, which includes some defenses and explanations of aspects of Rudy that you don't often see defended: Brooklyn museum battles, building the bunker at 7 World Trade, and even, to some extent, the heavily criticized policing that led up to the Diallo shooting.  read more »

His basic case is that Rudy took on the people Ed Koch used to call "poverty pimps," and that much of the conflict was inevitable. This book, and an, er, more critical collection Rob Polner edited for Soft Skull Press, mean that some sort of conversation is emerging about Rudy as Mayor, kind of a relief from the exclusive focus on 9/11 in the discussion of a guy who, after all, ran the city for eight years.

We spent the last week wading through the details of Social Security history and New York City's pension system, and report in today's paper on the astonishing -- to those of us who don't work for city government, at least -- fact that some city employees can opt out of Social Security and into a private plan, a form of privatization more complete than imagined by President Bush.

This choice is available to a class of roughly 20,000 people in New York City, and scattered pockets of state and local workers around the country. Here, they include elected officials and political staff. And four City Council Democrats have opted out. The two who copped to it, Oliver Koppell and David Yassky, didn't much want their personal choices to be taken as endorsements of President Bush's lobbying for...personal choice, wasn't it?

(If you happen to know who the other two Democrats are, we'd love to know.)

Now there are a million caveats to be attached, flaws in the Bush plan related to debt, and flaws in the city plan around disability insurance, for example. Still, this does look a bit like a functioning, fully private retirement system.  read more »

Anyway, when we were initially told about this option, we couldn't quite believe it, and if you still don't believe us, here's the city website that lays it out.

Also in the Observer today: Fred Siegel doesn't think much of Howard Dean, his fellow academics, and the alliance of the two; and the Dean of Columbia Law School ignites a spam war.

After seven years of charm, toughness, late hours and high spirits, John O'Sullivan steps down as ed  read more »