Where Is Rudy Guiliani

Where Is Rudy Giuliani?

There was a time, if one were handicapping who would be a future President, it would have been a good bet that the former New York Mayor would have been in, at least, the top five to make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Rudy is still known as America’s Mayor because the coattails he rightfully garnered during his stewardship of the 911 tragedy left a positive, indelible impression on New Yorkers and Americans as a whole. Giuliani seems to have fallen off the face of the earth… and there is no doubt that he is still out there making a ton of money from speaking engagements but Giuliani’s ambition for the Presidency seemed to have cooled. There are those who might blame the dying Presidential embers on the America’s Mayor turbulent personal life - let’s just say that the former New York Mayor is a lesser version of Newt Gingrich - but only from the North East.

Mayor Giuliani has an almost stellar governing record when he occupied GracieMansion (Mayor’s residence) and his governing legacy is still being felt here in New York. I first heard about Giuliani as a young man in California. My dad, perhaps because he was a police officer, used to laud the then young Giuliani, whose brilliant legal mind figured out how to prosecute the then Teflon New York mobsters under the Racketeering statutes. This was the era when it was rather difficult to garner successful prosecutions of the mobsters – but Giuliani did and blazed his way to the New York Mayor’s office.

I came to New York to attend school and when I came here initially, I hated it because among other gripes, my mother was afraid to ride the trains. However, when Giuliani took office, he cleaned up New York and ushered in the hundred of millions in revenues the Big Apple still make via the tourism industry. I have met the Mayor a few times because as a security guard, at what was then the second largest hospital (Brookdale), when an officer was shot in the line of duty and was brought to the hospital, the hospital security made it smooth for the dignitaries, including the mayor. Yet, just how I have given Mayor Giuliani his due and lauded him when it was warranted – so too I must address his negatives when he governed. I do not know how Mayor Giuliani feels about Blacks today, but back then… he came off as a stone-cold racist….

Two memories are etched in my mind about Mayor Giuliani’s dealings with Blacks residing in New York during his tenure: when the young prosecutor was running against New York’s first Black Mayor, Dinkins, there was a dispute between the incumbent Mayor and some of the police officers. Many New Yorkers watched, if I recalled correctly, a confrontation on the steps of the Mayor’s residence whereby Dinkins was repeatedly called a “nigger,” by some of the officers, while Giuliani was present. It is true that Mayor Giuliani did not engage in the racial epithet, but he did not chastise the officers either. And when officers shot an innocent African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, the indignity that Mayor Giuliani showed the visiting parents… who came to take their son’s body home for burial was despicable.

With all that said, Giuliani has had an excellent political career and with the current crop of candidates, it seems that he would make a formidable challenger in the Republican Primaries… but no one knows if his personal troubles have taken a toll or that he is enjoying the benisons of making speeches and the like. I would not vote for him because he is pro-choice, yet he seems more than qualified among the current candidates vying to take on President Obama in 2012.