From the NYT editorial endorsing McCain:
The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.
Okay, so I’ve been home to NYC quite a bit in recent years. Times Square is packed with families and family-oriented businesses. When I was a kid the Times Square subway station was one the most dangerous places in America, statistically speaking. Now, you can barely move there because of all the Chinese and European tourists and American school groups milling around.
Now where is the comparable evidence about “racial polarization”? We are more than a half decade into Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor of New York. Maybe I’ve not been reading the local coverage of the Times enough, but I don’t recall seeing or reading a lot to support the notion that racial polarization is a co-equal legacy to Giuliani’s tangible accomplishments, the revival of Times square merely being just one symbol of many such successes. Are racial tensions really so high in New York? Still? Evidence please.
Oh, and extra credit for someone who can explain why Giuliani deserves all of the blame for high racial tensions. Surely demagogues like Al Sharpton might deserve a tiny bit of the blame for trying to cast a crackdown on crime (crime that disproportionately harmed blacks) as a discriminatory racial vendetta by Giuliani.