Rudy Giuliani ascendant, efforts to run the former mayor's skeletons to ground are underway. Last week, a commentator on the left found the reel of a speech Giuliani gave at a rally, the fall before the 1993 New York mayoral race.
In the carefully edited twenty-five seconds of film we see Giuliani behind a podium, much younger and quite different from his appearance today. He is dressed for an office but as an adjunct, not management: light button-down shirt and tie, large and blocky spectacles, receding hair casually swept across. Rudy Giuliani is an unlikely empire's potentate. He looks staid. He isn't angry, but is, with a raised voice, midway through a rebuke of then-mayor David Dinkins.
"The mayor doesn't know why the morale of the New York City Police Department is so low," Giuliani says into the microphone. Cut to protesters marching, voiceover: "He blames it on me, he blames it on you" — cut to Giuliani, quick zoom as the man shouts, "bull——!"
The sight of today's leading Republican presidential candidate "unhinged," suggested the presenter, might weaken Giuliani's bid to "win the support of GOP 'values voters.'" Has he — have those in agreement — ever watched a stem-winder, or heard men talking roughly? How, on a New York street, could the word in question surprise, let alone offend? Were Giuliani censuring, from the left, a Republican reputedly laying city hall's bad fortunes on the force, not a single facet of the performance could be judged as heterodox to a tradition the last century gave the country almost to surfeit, speaking truth to power.
Least implausible is that Giuliani physically resembles William Foster from the movie Falling Down but even then, Michael Douglas' protagonist did something of a wry public good with his blunt-force vigilantism. The intense reformer is ever a sympathetic character, and Rudy, who was simply using words, has had voters value them highly.