What's behind the heroic facade?

Author: Gracielia Moreno

As a Middlebury parent and a long-time resident of New York City, I was distressed by the lead story in the March 10 issue of The Middlebury Campus - first by the news that Rudolph Giuliani was chosen to speak at Middlebury's commencement ceremony this May, then by The Campus's reverential tone in describing "New York City's icon and an American hero."

Giuliani is no hero to me. Nor is he a hero to millions of other New Yorkers whom he alternately ignored and brutalized during his eight-year reign as mayor. Rudy may be beloved by the city's investment bankers and big real estate developers, but we know a different Giuliani - an opportunist, a demagogue, a bully. Most of all, the Giuliani administration stood second to none for its vicious racism.

Before Giuliani was canonized by the national media, before he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he was, politically speaking, a dead man walking. The year before September 11, he'd been forced to bow out of his Senate race against Hillary Clinton - partly because of his prostate cancer, but also because his extramarital affair had grown into a tabloid scandal. By the summer of 2001, near the end of his second and final term, Giuliani's approval rating had dropped through the floor, and for good reason. Consider the great "achievements" of his tenure as mayor:

As The Campus blithely noted, Giuliani moved more than 600,000 recipients off the city's welfare rolls. The only catch was that poverty in New York actually increased during the mayor's reign, which meant that the most vulnerable people in our society - the physically and mentally disabled and, especially, impoverished children (who represent the majority of welfare recipients) - had lost their safety net. To keep their minimal benefits, tens of thousands of recipients, typically young single black or Latin mothers, were forced into workfare, dead-end jobs at slave-labor wages. The same people were discouraged by the Giuliani administration from applying for food stamps - illegally, according to a federal court.

In his passion to remake Manhattan as a theme park for rich people, Giuliani made homelessness a crime. His shock troops rousted people from midtown sidewalks - the only home they could afford, given the mayor's failure to build low-income housing - and handed them two options: they could go to one of the city's dangerous, Dickensian shelters, or they could be arrested. In the shelters, however, they could be thrown back on the streets if they refused a workfare assignment to pay for their bed. If homeless parents were unable to perform workfare, they fell subject to yet another Giuliani innovation - their children could be removed into foster care.

If nothing else, Giuliani is a master at public relations. Lucky enough to enter office at the dawn of an economic boom, he grabbed credit for the resulting growth in jobs and business profits. Fortunate, again, to benefit from national trends in declining crime, for complex reasons that more modest officials don't pretend to fully understand, Giuliani never failed to toot his own horn. And while NYPD statistics suggest that Giuilani's New York outpaced other large cities in this respect, those statistics have been widely attacked - by the mayor of Philadelphia, for starters - as being more juiced than Jason Giambi.

When he wasn't busy dealing with such ominous threats as hot dog vendors and the infamous squeegee men, Giuliani unleashed the NYPD to terrorize the city's minority neighborhoods - police brutality complaints and false arrests soared to record levels on this mayor's watch. In 1997, Abner Louima was assaulted and sodomized with a plunger at a Brooklyn precinct station. In 1999, four police officers gunned down Amadou Diallo with 41 bullets on his Bronx doorstep. In 2000, Patrick Dorismond, an off-duty security guard, was shot and killed by a narcotics detail in midtown Manhattan - Giuliani defended the cops by releasing Dorismond's sealed juvenile arrest record. The victims had three things in common: all were innocent of any crime, all were unarmed, all were black.

Decency is not a four letter word. When angered by "offensive" religious art at the Brooklyn Museum, Giuliani threatened to cut off city funding and formed a short-lived Decency Commission to avert future blasphemies. Once again he was overruled in federal court. The mayor's standing as Moral Arbiter was compromised, moreover, after the press revealed that he'd brought his mistress into his official residence at Gracie Mansion while his wife was still living there.

While Giuliani grandstanded on crime, the city's public school system fell down around his ears. The mayor cut billions from the schools' budget while simultaneously raising standards for student performance. The results were predictable: lower reading and math scores, more overcrowded classrooms, more dropouts.

Management genius. Thanks to tax cuts that mainly helped the wealthy, plus a glut of patronage hires, Giuliani turned a $3 billion budget surplus into a $4.5 billion deficit within his last three years in office. The city's ballooning debt service led to further spending cuts in education and health care.

Giuliani's importance in the wake of September 11 has been much exaggerated. He played virtually no role in the reconstruction of lower Manhattan. And while he certainly was telegenic in voicing his condolences at dozens of funerals, he also cashed in handsomely on the tragedy. His speaking fees zoomed to $100,000 per appearance and an estimated $10 million a year. He's made another fortune as CEO of Giuliani Partners LLC, where he advises business executives on "emergency preparedness, public safety, leadership during crises and financial management."

I find it unfortunate that Middlebury has opted to feed the Giuliani myth machine and his run for the presidency in 2008. Given the racism of his administration, his selection is a particularly insensitive choice for the black and Latin members of the Class of '05. But in truth, it is an insult to all of us.