Thursday, March 08, 2007

(George W. Bush's) America's Mayor

Up to my ears in work today, but I did think this piece by Jim Sleeper about Rudy Giuliani and why he'd make a Gawdawful president is worth checking out. Some tidbits:
...Yet Giuliani’s methods and motives suggest he couldn’t carry his skills and experience to the White House without damaging this country....

...The first serious problem is structural and political: A man who fought the inherent limits of his mayoral office as fanatically as Giuliani would construe presidential prerogatives so broadly he’d make George Bush’s notions of “unitary” executive power seem soft....

...As mayor, Giuliani fielded close aides like a fast and sometimes brutal hockey team, micro-managing and bludgeoning city agencies and even agencies that weren’t his, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Board of Education...

...What drove him as mayor was a zealot’s graceless division of everyone into friend or foe and his snarling, sometimes histrionic, vilifications of the foes. Those are operatic emotions, beneath the civic dignity of a great city and its chief magistrate...

Sound familiar?

/via Josh Marshall

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