Anybody considering voting for Rudy Giuliani in 2008 needs to read these two posts from Mahablog first.
I moved to NYC about a month before David Dinkins was defeated by Giuliani in the city mayoral elections in 1993. Giuliani defeated Dinkins that year, partly because Dinkins was seen as ineffective on crime and was criticized for his handling of the Crown Heights riots in 1991. Whether Giuliani deserves credit or not, there was a noticeable improvement in the safety of the city during his term and I think I benefited from that. I rode subways late into the night between Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan and never had any problems. In fact, I’d see cops a lot of the time. He pushed “zero tolerance” and “quality of life” aka “broken window theory”, cracking down on the aggressive squeegee guys and enforcing laws for smaller crimes on the theory that it’ll cut down on the bigger ones. This is all well and good, but it can be taken too far and it appears that’s what happened in the later 90’s (see the Mahablog articles). Giuliani has been accused of creating what amounted to a police state and was not known for his tolerance. Not the sort of attitude I think most of us want after 8 years of the Bush administration.
Update (2007.02.08): I totally forgot the number one reason not to vote for Giuliani. He completely ruined Times Square, turning it from a seedy, nasty underbelly of NYC full of porn shops, drugs, crime and hookers to Disneyland North.
[tags]rudygiuliani, nyc, candidate, campaign, elections, 2008[/tags]