Category: News and Opinion

The latest argument being made by Rudy’s supporters to conservatives is essentially “the enemy of your enemy is your friend”.

This argument made be Steve Malanga, George Will & John Podhoretz is that Giuliani in office overcame the vehement opposition of liberal special interests and the left-wing media to cut crime, slash taxes, fire City workers and banish squeegee men.

They then say that the fact that these bad guys (meaning liberals) were all against Rudy means he’s really “one of us” (meaning conservatives) despite abortion, gay rights, guns, Mario Cuomo, etc.

The March revision of Current Employment Survey data from the New York State Department of Labor is out, and official 2006 annual average data is out with it, so I have decided to see how different parts of New York State have fared (see spreadsheet). In the decade from 1996 to 2006, New York City gained 286,800 private sector jobs (10.2%), leaving it about 142,000 below the city’s employment peak in 1969, a pre-fiscal crisis year when the city’s poverty rate was actually below the national average. It is far above the rest of the nation, and the rest of the state, today. The rest of the state, which was close to all time employment highs in the mid-to-late 1990s, gained 300,400 jobs (8.1%) during the period. But those gains were not shared evenly. The Downstate Suburbs and Hudson Valley, feeding off Manhattan’s growth but without the local taxes associated with New York City’s poor, gained 262,000 private jobs (13.8%), the fastest growth anywhere in the state, while metro areas elsewhere upstate gained only 20,400 private jobs (1.5%). Removing job gains the Health Care and Social Assistance sectors, many of those metro areas lost private jobs. Even so, virtually every part of the state had a local government boom — except New York City. Back in your father’s economic decline, New York City has forced to swallow a substantial decline in public services and soaring taxes due to the need for “personal responsibility” when its private economy declined. Many of those public services are still more limited, and taxes higher, than in 1969. But this is not your father’s economic decline, and this time “society is to blame.”

The special election to find a replacement for Congresswoman Yvette Clarke in the NYC council, took place three weeks ago (2-20-07), with candidate Mathieu Eugene the indisputable winner. Now we are being told by the winner, that he will not submit documentation proving that he resided in the district by the day of the election, as the law states/requires, as interpreted by the Attorney General. But is Cuomo correct in this interpretation? We are in virgin territory folks.

In my 34 years in NYC politics, I have never seen or heard of the council requiring someone to prove their residency before swearing them into office. I am being told that it has never happened before in the four hundred and fifty-four year history of the council. So why do this now? Well, I will get to that in a minute.

All this press coverage almost a year before the first Primary over a year and a half before Election Day reminds me of nothing so much as something else happening right now – spring training in baseball.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, speaking after a fundraiser in New York last night, told reporters it was “early in the campaign” when asked about former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s surging poll numbers.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” The Associated Press quoted the Arizona senator as saying. “We are doing very well in the early primary states. This campaign … is still in spring training.

In 1973, when I migrated to New York City from the island of Trinidad, I was lucky enough to have caught the tail end of the civil-rights activism era. Ostensibly, back then, political activism/community involvement in most black areas of the city was something of a norm; ordinary people were much more civic-minded than they are today; parents were much more involved in their PTAs, school boards and police precinct councils. Back then, block associations and tenant associations flourished; there were vibrant members perpetually trying to hold things together within their communities/organizations. That was a time when people routinely attended community planning board meetings and also worked in local political campaigns for no money.

George Will has a column defending John McCain, Mitt Romney & Rudy Giuliani against those who think they are not conservative enough.

His defense of Rudy includes the following –

The suggestion that Sept. 11 required city tax increases triggered from Giuliani four adjectives: "dumb, stupid, idiotic and moronic."

Now that may be proof of conservatism but not that either Will or Rudy were correct. The attacks of Sept. 11 did damage the New York economy and that along with Rudy’s excessive spending that began when he ran for re-election required Mayor Bloomberg to raise taxes because of Sept. 11. Bloomberg’s actions, unpopular at the time, resulted in the City’s bouncing back with a stronger economy than under Rudy’s watch.

According to the press who cover politics, last week was a real good one for Rudy Giuliani. He increased his big lead in the Republican Presidential opinion polls. It was also good for Hillary Clinton who kept her lead in the Democratic polls and for Barack Obama who now leads Clinton among African-American voters.

Of course, if I was writing this before Room 8 was invented, I could have written that it was a good week for Nelson Rockefeller in 1963, George Romney in 1967, Edmund Muskie in 1971, George Wallace in 1975, Gary Hart in 1987, Mario Cuomo in 1991, and Joe Lieberman in 2003. All of those losing candidates were leading in the national polls at a similar time to this those years.

Well it looks like Mr. Skurnick and others will get their wish, and the New York primary will be moved up to February 5th along with a bunch of other states. This will induce future Presidents to pay attention to New York and ignore other states, until they retaliate by moving their primaries to January 20th, forcing New York to move its primary to January 3rd, and so on and so forth until the first primary for the next election takes place two days after the inauguration. I, too, was dismayed by the realization that with New York’s electoral votes locked up by the Democrats, and incumbents virtually unchallenged in legislative and congressional offices, there was basically no election in New York in 2004. This lack of democracy is not what they taught you in school. So I have another suggestion to make future Presidents to pay attention to New York – cut a deal with Texas to have the each state allocate its electoral votes in proportion to the percentage of the vote — if the other will as well.

It was a warm summer evening in the year 1991. It was somewhere around seven o’clock. Three or four of us were sitting in the headquarters of the Harriet Tubman political club (Nostrand Ave.and E.New York Ave./ Maple ), which was doubling that year as the campaign office for Maurice Gumbs. The NYC charter had extended the council to 51 members from 36; and the 40th district was created, by slicing out pieces from the districts of Mary Pinkett (deceased), Enoch Williams (retired to Florida where he is now the mayor of a small town), Susan Alter (who was to later run for Public Advocate, on a ticket with republican mayor Rudy Giuliani), and Weiner (East-Flatbush/ and south). Gumbs was facing Una Clarke and Carl Andrews in that race. If memory serves me right, it was the homestretch of that contest.