IN New York City, New Democrats aren't Bill Clinton or Dick Morris. They are Democrats who support Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani for re-election. One reason is opportunism. Their party's candidate is not going anywhere: Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger won a humiliatingly narrow victory in a Democratic primary that had the lowest turnout in years. The last time New York re-elected a Republican mayor was 1941, but the next time will be next month. The day after the primary, Mayor Giuliani received the submission of fifty Democrats who recognized this reality at a press conference in City Hall Park.

The party bolters spoke in generalities appropriate to the awkwardness of their situation. A city councilwoman from East New York said she believed that ``bringing the city back to where it should be does not have one iota of race or party, but the man who can do the job.'' A state assemblyman from Bensonhurst said Giuliani came to his district four years ago ``and listened very hardly.'' A labor leader recalled the words of a hymn: ``'Let the work that I have done speak for me.' Let the work that he's done speak for him.''

The mayor was there to speak for himself, in relaxed genial tones. This is not typical: the high forehead, the pale skin, the rigid jaw suggest a default mode of controlled fury, varied by uncontrolled fury. The defining fact about Giuliani's youth is that he was a Yankee fan who lived in the Brooklyn of the Dodgers. One day some young Dodger fans even tried to hang him from a tree. But he never recanted. The last time the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers met in a World Series, in 1956, the Yankees won -- ``which I used for ten years to totally destroy all my Dodger relatives,'' Giuliani told one interviewer. That is the essential Rudy: the Righteous Scorekeeper. But the scent of triumph has for the moment mellowed him.

There is an intellectual case for Democratic supporters of Giuliani, which is made by the city councilman for the Lower East Side, Antonio Pagan (accent on the second syllable -- a useful distinction, in his district). Pagan is a gay Puerto Rican, but since he is opposed to bums living in parks, he is perceived locally as a paleoconservative. When Giuliani was first elected, ``the city was falling apart. Giuliani gave voters a glimpse of hope that someone ballsy, aggressive, and tough could have an effect. Gays voted for him to have the streets cleaned up. Women are going to vote for him because he makes the streets safer for women.'' Meanwhile, ``Where is the reaction of Democrats? What are the Democratic values to be upheld against Giuliani? Hypodermic needles? Crumbling schools? Violence?'' Giuliani's record on crime and public order bears Pagan out. Since 1993, robbery and car theft have fallen by more than 40 per cent, and murder has fallen almost 50 per cent. New York has the lowest crime rate of any American city with a population over one million.

Unfortunately, there is another reason so many Democrats back Rudy. To buy time for his law-and-order reformation, he has acquiesced in some very old arrangements. The labor leader at the press conference put it concisely. ``Rud-off Giuliani didn't lay off anybody.'' The structural reformation of government and the economy has been put off to the second term. Or more likely, as many New Yorkers would say, to next pesach (Yiddish for never).

RUDOLPH Giuliani, born in 1944, became famous in the mid Eighties, as a typical Eighties figure: a censor of corruption and greed. In the Seventies he had switched his registration from Democratic to Republican, and served a stint in the Reagan Justice Department. In 1983 he became U.S. Attorney for the southern District of New York, and his career took off. He was aggressive, headline-grabbing, none too scrupulous about the finer points of civil liberties, and often effective. He used the RICO Act against organized crime, and pioneered the use of asset forfeiture in prosecuting drug dealers. Most Americans don't mind cutting a few corners to get pushers and mobsters, but such techniques have, as the Supreme Court might say, penumbras. Giuliani bagged David Levine and Ivan Boesky in pursuit of Michael Milken, and in a spectacular bust he hauled two arbitrageurs from their desks at Goldman Sachs in handcuffs. In the latter case he overreached: the charges against the men were dropped. He also moved against political corruption in New York City, toppling the Democratic leaders of the Bronx and Queens (Donald Manes, the Queens chieftain, committed suicide rather than face the music).

POLITICS now beckoned. Mayor Ed Koch was at the end of his third term. Feisty and funny but no detail man, he had become the city's jester, and the act had worn thin. Rudy geared up to depose Koch in the 1989 mayoral race, using an old model, the fusion campaigns of John Lindsay and Fiorello LaGuardia -- an alliance of good-government types, Republicans, and liberals, capitalizing on popular boredom and discontent.

The coronation was interrupted, however, by a string of sensational crimes with racial angles. The last of them, the fatal beating of a black teenager by a mostly white mob in the white neighborhood of Bensonhurst, happened on the eve of the Democratic primary. (It was such a big story I first heard about it on television in Bangkok.) Koch lost to David Dinkins, a solemn hack, who went on in November to become New York's first black mayor.

The city looked to Dinkins for racial peace, and to his manner for a relief from Koch's brashness. It found neither. Black bigots in Brooklyn ran a months-long boycott of a Korean fruitstand while Dinkins stood by, impotent. In 1991 a black mob rioted in the Hasidic section of Crown Heights for three nights, bellowing ``Kill the Jews!'' and actually killing one. Dinkins's police force seemed to move in slowly. Temperamentally, the mayor, like many incompetent people, proved to be self-pitying and small-minded. Dinkins did hire more cops, and the crime rate moved down, but this was lost in the general frenzy.

Giuliani prepared for a rematch, though there seemed to be no reason to think that he could add anything to the city's political mix besides a change of personalities. But Giuliani had been learning. The most important thing he learned was a new style of policing, based on a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, ``Broken Windows.'' The Kelling - Wilson thesis was that crime is not effectively fought by more cops or tougher cops, unless they get tough on the right things: low-level, often victimless crimes, like loitering, panhandling, and petty drug dealing. Like an unreplaced broken window, these offenses, when unpunished, convey the message that nobody in authority cares. The law-abiding retreat, discouraged, to their homes; criminals, including serious criminals, fill the vacuum.

Broken-windows policing got a test run in the New York subways, when William Bratton, a Boston transplant, took over the Transit Police in 1990. By 1993 Giuliani was willing to give it a try above ground. He also pledged to cut some of New York's taxes: an income-tax surcharge imposed by Dinkins, a commercial-rent tax, and a hotel-occupancy tax.

Giuliani won, but he had no mandate. The election results suggested that voters had paid hardly any attention to the records or the rhetoric of the candidates. The breakdown was starkly racial. City Hall changed hands because a handful of white liberals, though liberals still, were terrified of getting killed.

Undismayed, Giuliani set to work. He tapped Bratton to be Chief of Police. Their first test was the squeegee men -- bums who accosted motorists at intersections, offering to ``clean'' their windshields. They were filthy and offensive, and most of them had criminal records. Bratton advised them and other panhandlers, ``Get off drugs, get off the booze, get off your ass, and get a job.'' Giuliani also moved against mob bailiwicks such as the garbage-hauling industry. The crime statistics began their southward march.

Meanwhile, as a politician he engaged in politics. The best that can be said for Giuliani's political style is that it is occasionally entertaining. In 1994 he crossed party lines to endorse Democratic governor Mario Cuomo, declaring that the election of his GOP challenger, George Pataki, would mean four years of ``sleaze,'' courtesy of Pataki's patron, Sen. Alfonse D'Amato. As Mayor Giuliani has since made peace with the two Republican solons, he must consider his charge overblown. But embracing Cuomo made him a pariah in the GOP, and upstate. On one campaign swing an angry crowd at the Utica airport prevented him from getting out of his plane. Worst of all, Cuomo lost.

Back home, Giuliani and Bratton found that the same success story was not big enough for both of them. The police chief liked expensive suits, good press, and dinner at Elaine's, a Manhattan writers' hangout. Giuliani looked on in rage and envy. The fatal blow to Bratton's career was struck by Bratton himself, when he appeared, alone, on a cover of Time devoted to crime-fighting in New York. After such PR, what forgiveness? Bratton was out within weeks.

Giuliani made himself a national pointman for unrestricted immigration, chiding doubters and ordering his bureaucracy not to turn in illegal immigrants who reported crimes or other abuses. Giuliani's routine on immigration is more attractive than Mario Cuomo's, who carried on endlessly about the indignity suffered by his mother when WASP neighbors reminded her to put lids on her garbage cans. Giuliani will say that his immigrant father fought against his homeland in World War II. It is more honorable to focus on brave veterans than old grudges. But Giuliani still assumes that every present immigrant is a clone of his ancestors -- and that the country now has the same needs as the country to which they moved.

None of it mattered. As long as crime went down, New Yorkers conceded that Giuliani had got the big issue right. Even his vices -- stridence, stubbornness, prickliness -- helped him, for the very qualities that led him into vendettas and blowups suggested that he would stay the course on public order.

As the primary season approached, prominent Democrats took themselves out of the field, until only one, Ruth Messinger, was left. As William Tucker pointed out in the New York Press, Mrs. Messinger has been saying some sensible things. She wants to lower business taxes, and she proposes to make up lost revenue by privatizing city services, as mayors in Indianapolis and Philadelphia have done. Her problem is that no one believes her, for her campaign runs counter to her long political record. The Ruth Messinger New Yorkers have known for twenty years is an Upper West Side tricoteuse who railed against development, pushed for business-tax hikes, and jaunted to Nicaragua in her spare time. Even now old habits linger: she blasted Giuliani as an enemy of the little guy who ``drives in limousines'' -- then drove off in a limousine. Her right-leaning talk only alienated her base, without convincing anyone.

Nipping at her heels was the Rev. Al Sharpton. It is true that he is charming, informed, and shrewd -- and that, like Jesse Jackson, has the ability to master a moment. My favorite Sharpton riposte came when some tabloid photographers staked out the beauty salon where he was getting his hair waved. When they burst in, Sharpton, unfazed, waved them closer, to record how a ``real man'' gets his hair done. It is also true that he is a liar and a racial incendiary. He publicized the Tawana Brawley hoax -- a racial assault faked by a teenaged girl to avoid the wrath of her violent stepfather. More recently, he joined protests outside Freddy's Fashion Mart, a white-owned store in Harlem -- until one of his fellow protestors stormed inside, shot four people, and then set a fire which killed seven. Sharpton himself is probably not a hater. He is worse -- he is an impresario of hatreds.

In the home stretch of this year's primary campaign Sharpton got something hateful to talk about. In August, four cops in the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn were accused of seizing a Haitian man during a sidewalk confrontation, taking him to the station house, and beating and torturing him with a toilet plunger. (The victim spent weeks in the hospital.) Rudy Giuliani moved swiftly to shake up the precinct, Al Sharpton moved into high gear, and Ruth Messinger was a space between bookends. The primary was a disaster for her. She won, but the turnout was so low -- an implicit stay-at-home vote for Giuliani -- that Sharpton, pulling only his base, seemed to have won the 40 per cent required to force a run-off. The following week, a plodding count of paper and absentee ballots showed that Sharpton had in fact fallen short. Mrs. Messinger got the worst of all worlds -- a black eye, without the chance of knocking Sharpton out.

THE parade of Democrats for Giuliani continues (the list now includes two congressmen). What could go wrong?

``There is a huge job to be done in restructuring government that hasn't even begun yet,'' Fred Siegel, a professor of history at Cooper Union, told a luncheon at the Harvard Club. The source of the criticism and the sponsor of the event -- the Manhattan Institute -- are revealing. Siegel and the Institute -- New York's only conservative think tank -- were, before 1993, conveyer belts to Giuliani of his freshest ideas. Siegel's message, in his talk and in his new book, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities -- is that serious problems remain. The streets are safe, but the foundations are rotten.

New York carries an enormous public sector, the result of what Siegel calls running a New Deal in one city. Two out of eleven New Yorkers are on some form of welfare; a third of the work force is employed by government-run, health and social services. Welfare in New York is workfare -- not for welfare recipients, but for the helping professionals who tend them. Public workers wield enormous political clout, even as they produce a major economic effect. Almost half of the city's $32-billion budget goes to the salaries of public employees. Mayor Giuliani was able to keep the police from getting a raise as big as they wanted, but other city employees have left the bargaining table happy. The economy that must pay for these services is not strong. New York has recovered a third of the jobs it lost during the last recession, but across the Hudson, New Jersey has recovered all its lost jobs. Wall Street pulls more than its share, and its pull is not dependable. The economy, said Siegel, has ``a tubercular glow . . . But if the market sinks to an unthinkable 6000, that's when the crunch comes.''

Giuliani has not much helped matters. He did end the hotel-occupancy tax and trim the commercial-rent tax. But he reneged on his pledge to repeal the income-tax surcharge (the city's personal income tax now stands at 4.5 per cent, a percentage point ahead of any other city in the nation). Symbol of Giuliani's bondage to old ideas was his position on rent control, an ``emergency'' measure that has been in place since World War II. When upstate Republicans, egged on by the landlords, proposed to abolish it, Giuliani reacted as if they wanted to dynamite the Statue of Liberty. The rustics retreated before the bellowing of the apartment dwellers, and rent control remains.

One useful thing Giuliani has talked of doing in his second term is reforming the school system. The chancellor of New York's public schools is an independent official, neither appointed by nor answerable to the mayor. The bureaucrats at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, the system's headquarters, are not responsible to anyone; no one even knows how many of them there are. In 1994 the then-chancellor found 3,500 of whose existence he had been unaware. Everyone knows the system is in shambles, and Giuliani may succeed in getting Albany to rationalize it. Giuliani's other announced second-term goal is to make New York ``drug-free.'' Siegel shakes his head: ``That's like rural beautification in Van Cortlandt Park.'' Siegel fears that, after Giuliani punted the tough decisions, it may now be too late. ``Giuliani should have governed as though he expected to be a one-term mayor. . . . You can't jump a chasm in two leaps.''

But Giuliani may not even be thinking about the chasm. After he wins in November, he will never have to run for mayor again, since term limits have been voted in. He might think of challenging Gov. Pataki or Sen. D'Amato, if he should rediscover ``sleaze'' between now and 1998. More likely, he is aiming for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Senate seat in 2000; or -- who knows? -- New Hampshire.

It would be a pity if a half-done job in New York were to be his launching pad.

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