When Rudy was Hizzoner, this reader worked in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation:
Peter,
Thanks for your putdown…of Michael Gerson’s invidious comparison of Mayor Giuliani with Richard Nixon, in essence suggesting that both were/are political opportunists without core beliefs….
My sense of Rudy from working in city government during his entire mayoralty is similar to your anecdote about the screwy OSHA analysis of Yankee Stadium. Rudy consistently sought to apply accountability to NYC government, took on sacred leftist shibboleths (affirmative action, hostility to the police), introduced far reaching innovations into government operations (CompStat, welfare-to-work), cut taxes and supported pro-business policies to unshackle the local economy, and stood up to leftist bullies like the NY Times, Yasser Arafat and Al Sharpton. From my on-the-ground view as a line manager in NYC government, Rudy governed as a liberating force applying conservative governing principles designed to help individual New Yorkers and private business flourish. I can’t ever imagine Giuliani as president adopting a cynical Nixonian policy such as wage and price controls (cynical especially when you consider that Nixon worked for a while in a World War II wage and price control bureaucracy and knew firsthand how deleterious such a policy was).