“Now we have a mayor of New York,” exclaimed the political reformer Samuel Seabury when Fiorello LaGuardia took over City Hall in 1934. Exactly 60 years later, Rudolph Giuliani, another Italian Republican-Liberal, accomplished the same improbable feat of getting elected in overwhelmingly Democratic New York. Of course, today’s New Yorkers are too cynical, and too disillusioned with government, to permit themselves a similarly enthusiastic reaction. But they certainly sense that someone, at last, is in charge. The question remains: is he taking the city in the right direction?

There is something unfair about attempting to appraise the performance of any mayor of New York when he is only halfway through a first term. For one thing, the city is more akin to a lumbering ocean liner than to a speedboat: the huge bureaucracy, the entrenched special interests, the iron dictates of demography combine to make sudden changes of direction difficult to execute; even the most skilled and determined helmsman needs time before he can know how his voyage will fare—or even that it is well and truly under way.

For another thing, the effects of a mayoral initiative are often only barely discernible early in his tenure. If, for example, he changes personnel practices so as to attract more talented municipal employees, the benefits will not become apparent until sufficient time has elapsed to permit a meaningful turnover.

Then, too, under the best of circumstances a mayor’s room for maneuver is extremely limited. The foxy British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, once said that the only thing he feared was “events.” Everyone who has risen to the pinnacle of what appears to be power in New York must know just what Macmillan meant. A British Prime Minister cannot control exchange rates; a New York mayor cannot control interest rates. If the Federal Reserve Board decides to send those rates up, New York’s retail sales, and therefore tax receipts, drop; layoffs, and therefore legitimate claims for public assistance, rise; and, inevitably, mayoral plans to improve the city’s fiscal condition come to naught. The level of the dollar is more important to the success of the city’s tourist industry (which depends on foreigners for over 40 percent of its revenues) than is the mayor’s ability to persuade the hotel industry and its unionized employees to come to mutually agreeable terms. Misguided national-welfare policies can leave any New York mayor impotent to break the cycle of dependency that spells ruin for entire sections of his city.

A New York mayor’s power is also limited by the structure of government. In the recent fiasco over the appointment of a new schools chancellor, Giuliani could fume and twist arms, but, for better or worse, he could not put his own man in charge of an educational system so badly managed that it threatens the city’s ability to retain its taxpaying middle class and to attract business. So, too, with issues as broad as tax policy and as detailed as how to structure the police department: the mayor finds himself a supplicant before a governor, George Pataki, whose election he opposed and who anyhow has his own constituency to cater to, and a senator, Alfonse D’Amato, who has been his sworn enemy for more years than Giuliani has been in elected office.

Add to these impediments the fact that Giuliani is not writing on a clean slate. To be sure, every mayor comes with baggage, personal and institutional. Edward I. Koch brought his Greenwich Village liberalism with him to City Hall in 1978, only to shed much of it when (to borrow from Irving Kristol) he was mugged by reality. David Dinkins (1990-93) brought his faith in the city bureaucracy and clung to it in the face of experience, with the result that he now graces boardrooms and classrooms instead of City Hall.

But Giuliani came to the mayor’s office with more baggage than most—specifically, his record as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (1983-89), which included years of trampling on the rights of defendants, prosecutorial abuses, and a degree of publicity-seeking that would have been comic had Giuliani not destroyed the reputations of others in a calculated drive to enhance his own. Here was a man willing to arrest innocent people too late at night for them to post bail and so avoid a dangerous night in jail; to swoop into business offices, trailed by photographers, and handcuff weeping executives he would later be unable to indict, much less convict; and simultaneously to arrange such lenient treatment for a confessed felon like Ivan Boesky that this one-time arbitrageur soon became a free and still very rich habitué of the world’s pleasure spots.

This legacy has political significance. Any Republican mayor looks to the city’s business community for support and cooperation, and he can usually count on it, at least until he treads on some well-shod toes. Giuliani, however, came to City Hall only after having outraged important segments of the financial community and raised severe doubts in many quarters about his character.

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So New Yorkers had much to worry about when they decided (by the narrowest of margins) to exchange nice Dave Dinkins for decidedly un-nice Rudy Giuliani. Character matters: it determines whether promises will be kept; whether democratic procedures will be respected or undermined; whether government can make hard choices without forfeiting the respect of the citizenry. The question in Giuliani’s case was: could a man modeled on Thomas E. Dewey, an earlier prosecutor who had made it to Albany and almost to the White House more on his fame as a crime-buster than on an endearing personality or a coherent set of policy convictions, really render New York habitable again?

Nor was Giuliani’s prosecutorial record the only or even the major item of baggage. Dinkins did not will his successor a city with a few tiny flaws, easily correctable by a policy tweak here and there. Rather, he bequeathed a city on the verge of breakdown, the culmination of decades of catastrophic liberal policies that had forced a flight of the personal and corporate tax base, resulted in a public sector so bloated that over 20 percent of the population was on the government’s payroll, and produced a welfare population that included one out of every seven New Yorkers. Giuliani also inherited a bureaucracy that could not clean the streets or provide citizens with a sense that they were safe—or at least not at enormous risk—in attending the city’s schools, using its public transport, or walking about of a summer evening.

Worse still, Dinkins’s indiscriminate “niceness” had made the city almost ungovernable. The Reverend Al Sharpton and his portable rent-a-mob seemed to have more power than the people’s duly elected representatives; neighborhood drug dealers seemed in greater control of the streets than the tightly tethered and demoralized police force; the voluntary homeless and their radical advocates seemed more in charge of the city’s housing policies than did the legally appointed administrators of the city’s housing stock.

True, against these burdens and constraints must be set an overwhelming advantage, denied to Giuliani’s predecessors for more than 60 years. This mayor came into office at a time when the welfare state and the big government it had spawned no longer commanded national support. Even New Yorkers, more tenacious than others in adhering to New Deal nostrums—in 1994, the year of the Gingrich sweep, they chose a congressional delegation of thirteen Democrats and only one Republican—seemed to know that the public larder was bare, that Dinkins-style “compassion” was unaffordable. At least, a sufficient number did to join their fellows in Los Angeles, Jersey City, and other municipalities in expressing a willingness, on the local level, to experiment with smaller government, tougher law enforcement, and an emphasis on individual responsibility.

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These, then, are the cards Giuliani was dealt. How well has he played them?

Any assessment must begin, perforce, with intangibles. The first of these is the very widespread sense that the city is no longer spinning out of control. In part this is owing to the simple fact that Giuliani regards the phrase “petty crime” as an oxymoron. Scholars like James Q. Wilson, Wesley Skagan, and George L. Kelling have long argued that, in Kelling’s words, “disorder is a precursor of serious crime.” Giuliani agrees. It was altogether emblematic of his campaign that he made a point of promising to bring assault charges against “squeegee operators,” men who menaced drivers with offers to wipe the windshield of their cars. When he made this pledge, the New York Times recognized the theory underlying it, but took a dismissive tone:

The Republican-Liberal candidate stresses the “broken windows” thesis of criminologists that tolerance of petty street disorder has been shown . . . to invite far more felonious problems—just as a broken window that goes unfixed can suggest the broader decline of a building or a neighborhood. Thus is the “war on crime” theme of modern politics taking on urban subtleties.

Dinkins, too, failed to see a campaign against squeegee men as more than an “urban subtlety.” “Killers and rapists are a city’s real public enemies—not squeegee pests and homeless mothers,” he declared.

But Giuliani had it right and Dinkins had it wrong. The squeegee men were not a minor annoyance, or (as some would have it) an army of the involuntarily unemployed seeking gainful occupation. Nor was an offer to wipe a car window equivalent to an offer to sell the driver a newspaper; it was perceived as, and very often was, extortion—a threat to damage the vehicle (or person) of any driver who declined the proffered service—and it induced a feeling of vulnerability, of helplessness, that transcended the specific uncomfortable situation in which the motorist found himself, and fostered a sensation of danger at large.

Ubiquitous rag-wielding windshield cleaners were not the only things creating the impression that the streets were beyond the control of the city’s officials. The likes of Sharpton, who could command the mayor’s attention at the drop of a demonstration; mobs that closed whole portions of the city to the police; thugs who, unimpeded, terrorized the hard-working Korean immigrants in their grocery stores—all of these sent the unmistakable signal to ordinary citizens, if not to their then-mayor, that the bad guys were in control of the streets.

Giuliani saw all this with crystal clarity, and as mayor he has acted: the wipe-your-windshield-or-else brigade, many of whose members proved on closer inspection to have felony records, is largely gone from the approaches to Manhattan and its busy intersections. Giuliani also stopped the kowtowing to incendiary “activists” by simply refusing to meet with Sharpton, on the quite sensible grounds that he was not worthy of mayoral time.

These moves instantaneously provoked charges of racism. Just as instantaneously, Giuliani defused them by reaching out to the black community’s legitimate representatives. Within days of his election and almost two months before his inauguration, he met (to the consternation of some of his supporters) with Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel. The message was unmistakable: the mayor would deal with elected representatives or quiet, rational spokesmen of any group, but not with those whose only claim to an audience was the threat to disrupt the peace and civility of New York life.

The assessment that Giuliani has restored a modicum of order to the city’s life is, admittedly, based in part on anecdote. But polls reflect it as well: 42 percent of the city’s residents say that police protection has improved since Giuliani took control; only 11 percent think it has deteriorated. And there are also some cold statistical measures of Giuliani’s performance in this respect.

Both as a candidate and since taking office, Giuliani has made public safety his top priority, and with good reason. Safe streets are not only desirable in and of themselves, they are a key ingredient in any long-term plan to revive the city’s flagging economy. Businessmen seeking new locations, or deciding on expansion, place great emphasis on their ability to attract young professionals, and on the safety of their own families. Because an unsafe city is very likely to become an economically blighted city, crime prevention is an important ingredient of economic development: the recent murder of a few tourists in Florida frightened hundreds of thousands of others into finding safer places to visit.

Hence the significance of the large drop in crime in the past year. According to the New York City Police Department (NYPD), murders were down by more than 40 percent in the first six months of 1995 as compared with the same period in 1993, Dinkins’s last year in office; car thefts had fallen by more than 35 percent, robberies by 32 percent, and burglaries by 24 percent. Even incidents of forcible rape, a figure one would have expected to trend upward because of the increased willingness of victims to report this crime, have dropped by about 5 percent. And all of this has occurred in the face of only a slight decrease in the teenage population, the group most likely to commit violent crimes.

That factors other than the policies of Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton, have contributed to this development—which even the generally anti-Giuliani New York Times concedes is “little short of amazing”—is quite possible; several other large cities have also recorded significant reductions in crime recently. But it would be churlish to deny that more cops on the streets, more efficiently deployed, together with the boost the police have received from a mayor who declines to see a moral equivalence between cops and robbers, and has no truck with “root-cause” explanations of crime as the result of “social injustice,”¹ are primary factors in a trend that may bring the murder rate down to its lowest level in 25 years.

This seems demonstrably to be true for the decline in street shootings. Police officials themselves credit the drop in this bloody activity to the increase in arrests on gun charges in the past two years. According to Jack Maple, the mayor’s deputy commissioner of crime-control strategy, those arrests are, in turn, the fruit of a Giuliani-ordered crackdown on such supposedly minor and previously unpunished crimes as graffiti-scrawling, urinating in public, the loud playing of radios, public beer drinking, and illegal lane-changing. He points out that the tough new policy permits the police to frisk perpetrators and to check their records for outstanding warrants, with the consequence that criminals tend increasingly to leave their guns at home.

Whether the mayor’s success against street crime can be extended to a reduction of organized corruption remains to be seen. Certainly, the NYPD itself has a long way to go before it can be pronounced as squeegee-clean as the city’s intersections. And the recent attempt to wrest control of the Fulton Street fish market from alleged racketeers cannot yet be pronounced a success. For one thing, the banning of firms only suspected of being controlled by the mob brings to mind the Giuliani of an earlier day, setting himself up as prosecutor, judge, and jury. For another, the cost of the so-called reform may prove to be inordinately high, in part because new workers are inexperienced but in part, too, because the new paperwork requirements imposed by the city’s bureaucrats are so onerous.

In any event, there can be no gainsaying that New Yorkers feel safer, and are safer, than in many a year. Nor is there any question that the city’s “quality of life” seems to be improving in other respects as well. The mayor’s recent Management Report points with pride to the (modest) increases in the number of streets rated “acceptably clean,” in the number of parks and playgrounds in “acceptable” condition, and even to the decline in water-main breaks.

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Education is another, and less happy, tale. Here, Giuliani can legitimately claim that his power is severely limited. His efforts to cut the bloated Board of Education bureaucracy have been undertaken in the teeth of educrats clinging to a system in which it is impossible even to know how many of them there are. His fight to improve safety in the schools founders on the rock of civil libertarians eager to protect students’ privacy from the probing eyes of metal detectors. His attempts to upgrade the quality of teaching are thwarted by teachers’ unions that elevate seniority over excellence, and by politically-correct administrators devoted to expensive exercises in multiculturalism, bilingualism, and “special-education” projects.

In Giuliani’s own words, “The entire [public-education] system is in great, great danger. If we don’t do something dramatic, it is going to collapse.” This is true, and little wonder. The city’s per-pupil annual cost of $8,000 exceeds the national average by 60 percent, and is twice that of New York’s parochial schools, which have fewer dropouts, are generally safe, and send a larger proportion of their students on to college.

But by and large, although Giuliani talks the talk, he has yet to walk the walk. Rather, he has dithered, producing mostly diatribes against the Board of Ed, groans about the current state of the system, speeches in praise of parochial schools, and futile efforts to impose a personally acceptable chancellor. He has hesitated to deploy his famed political hard-ball tactics to develop a voucher system that would free the city’s one million students to choose their own schools—despite the fact that in a recent survey fully 60 percent of those polled in New York City favored “a program which would allow parents to send their children to the public, parochial, or private school of their choice and use state and local tax dollars to pay for all or part of it.”

The mayor’s reluctance to push for radical reform is doubly unfortunate. Like the fight against crime, the battle to revamp the city’s school system has an importance beyond producing graduates who can read and write. The quality of education determines the quality of the city’s workforce, and hence its ability to thrive in an increasingly competitive world economy. It is also a major element in the relative attractiveness of New York to businesses. In a recent Forbes survey, New York received only two out of a possible five points for the quality of its “general education,” ranking below 59 other large metropolitan areas. Such is the stuff, again, of which business-location decisions are often made.

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Which brings us to the city’s fiscal condition. The job-destroying effect of high local taxes, in an economy in which instantaneous telecommunications have increased the mobility of resources, is too well known to warrant rehearsal here. Even Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, came to recognize (belatedly) that businesses and skilled professionals can now vote against higher taxes with their feet, and that New York was pricing itself out of the investment and jobs markets.

But businessmen look at more than the current level of taxes when deciding where to put long-lived plant and equipment. They look as well at the likely future levies they will have to bear. A city on the brink of financial disaster is a city facing a great temptation to raise taxes, a temptation to which it often surrenders (while pledging that this will be its last fling before going on an austerity diet). Or it will be tempted to cut just those services that are important to the business community, in order to maintain payments to the more numerous voters who benefit from its various welfare programs. This is a particular danger in New York, where (as mentioned earlier) 20 percent of the labor force works in public and social services, and one in seven persons receives some form of public assistance.

Only a mayor willing to defy this formidable bloc of voters, and to impose short-term pain in the interest of long-term gain, can hope to bring some order to a city budget that, like its streets, has seemed beyond the control of mayor and City Council alike.

Equally important, the city’s budget is the battle-ground on which competing philosophies of the role of government are defined in the very practical terms of “priorities.” In the long run, safer streets and lower taxes mean more jobs and fewer poor people, as well as an increased flow of revenues into the city’s coffers. But in the short run, more cops mean fewer teachers, and lower taxes to encourage business mean less money to fund welfare programs and education. Giuliani may, like Prince Hamlet, contend that “I must be cruel only to be kind,” but his critics see his budgets as merely cruel.

The hard fact, too, is that the city’s budgetary fate is decided not only in City Hall but in Albany and, of course, in Washington. Thus, Giuliani’s plan to cut expenses was derailed when the governor and the state legislature refused to trim Medicaid and welfare programs to which the city contributes a share of the costs. And the federal budget-cutting being undertaken by the Republicans in Washington will be felt in areas ranging from transportation and medicine to the welfare system and beyond.

Given all this, how has Giuliani fared? His staff claims he will save $2.3 billion in 1996 over what would have been spent if expenditures in a second Dinkins term had grown at the same rate as in the first. An analysis by the city’s Office of Management and Budget shows a $1-billion reduction in expenses of city agencies in fiscal 1995, and another $1.2-billion cut in 1996, part of gap-closing efforts of $2.3 billion and $3.1 billion respectively. These initiatives, which have contributed to ending the seemingly inexorable rise in city expenses, and may reverse them, have brought projected outlays to a bit more than $31 billion, about half of which goes to wages for city workers.

What do the reductions mean substantively? Welfare, Medicaid, education, and other city services have been cut, as have a variety of business taxes. Giuliani had to cede some ground to the City Council, restoring a few hundred million for school renovation and $80 million to youth services, mental health, arts groups, and similar supplicants, and lowering some business taxes by a smaller amount than at first proposed. Overall, though, he did succeed—somewhat—in shrinking government and—again, somewhat—in imposing his priorities: less welfare spending, more police protection, lower taxes.

But the price he paid was this: an electorate that voted for fiscal prudence as a general proposition nevertheless found Giuliani’s specific cuts so distasteful that his popularity plummeted. And, paradoxically, so did New York’s standing with the bond-rating agencies. This summer, Standard & Poor’s lowered the city’s rating for the first time since 1975, when it was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The IOU’s of Rudy Giuliani’s New York now rank just a notch above those of Marion Barry’s Washington, D.C., and well below the bonds of such troubled cities as Baltimore and Chicago.

The real problem is the bloated municipal workforce, whose staffing practices are a tribute to historic union resolve and mayoral pusillanimity. Giuliani contends that, politics being the art of the possible, he has achieved much of what is possible in this realm: the city’s payroll has been trimmed by 17,000 positions, largely through buyouts; agreements already reached with unions have realized $2 billion in savings; health-insurance costs per employee are declining; and (in the words of the city’s then-commissioner of labor relations) the mayor’s “partnership with municipal unions . . . has empowered and energized the city’s workforce.”

Unfortunately, the $600 million in savings the mayor expects from the 83 municipal unions is less than 4 percent of New York’s $15.8-billion wage bill. And, as Standard & Poor’s noted in lowering the city’s rating, some $160 million of the $600 million may never materialize. Yet Giuliani, although he has fought some noble fights, has conspicuously avoided a real shoot-out with the unions, in good part because he wants their support for his 1996 reelection bid. The boasts about “partnership” notwithstanding, not one of the city’s 207,000 unionized workers has been laid off, or had his generous benefits, vacation time, or sick days reduced.

The result of all this is that the combined debt of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (formed in the mid-70’s to see New York out of bankruptcy) and the city stands at $28 billion, and is rising. This, notes the Economist, means that “New York may face a crisis almost as grave as its problems of twenty years ago.” Then, Governor Hugh Carey bailed the city out. But George Pataki is no Hugh Carey. He knows that his own upstate electoral margin increased dramatically when Giuliani decided to support Mario Cuomo for governor. Helping to save the city will not produce votes for Pataki; to the contrary, he would do better, politically, by saying to New York what President Gerald Ford is reputed to have said but never did—namely, “Drop dead.”

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To conclude that the mayor has failed to solve the city’s long-festering fiscal crisis in the first half of what he hopes is his first term is not to say that his is a failed administration. Far from it.

He has kept his word, or at least tried to. Candidate Giuliani promised to reduce crime; Mayor Giuliani has done so. Candidate Giuliani promised to attack the city’s welfare and tax burdens; Mayor Giuliani has done that. Candidate Giuliani promised to restore sanity to the city’s budget; Mayor Giuliani has begun that chore, even though he has nowhere near completed it.

And so, were Giuliani to ask, Ed Koch-like, “How’m I doin?,” the fair answer might be: “Not bad.” Or, to put it in terms of the question posed at the very beginning of this article, yes, he is taking the city in the right direction.

But is this enough? Giuliani has played his cards reasonably well; but he is in a high-stakes game, in which the real prize is not a slowing of the city’s descent into the abyss of urban decay, but a reversal. That prize may well be reserved for a gambler with more nerve than the Giuliani we have seen so far, someone prepared not just to play his cards well but to demand that the deck be reshuffled and that he be dealt a new hand. Someone on the order of a Margaret Thatcher, a Ronald Reagan, a Newt Gingrich.

Contrast the mayor’s performance with that of the two most successful conservative politicians of our time, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The power of the British trade unions, which had brought successive British governments to their knees, made that of New York’s pale by comparison. But Prime Minister Thatcher won and the unions lost, bowled over by the resolve of the “Iron Lady” as well as by her ability to rally public opinion and stiffen the spines of timid politicians. Similarly Ronald Reagan in the case of the air-traffic controllers: their threat to shut down America’s airtransport system failed—not because the President sought some compromise that would keep the controllers on the job and win political support from other powerful public-employees’ unions, but because he was willing to lock them out and to serve notice that the nation would not be held to ransom. As for Gingrich and his acolytes, whether they will succeed in their effort to balance the budget, halt the growth in the welfare state, and reduce the role of central government remains to be seen. But they would surely have failed altogether had they sought to accommodate rather than rout their opponents.

Herein lies hope. Strange things happen when leaders lead, and they could happen even in New York. The task facing the man of the hour is as simple in theory as it is difficult in fact: reduce the bloated compensation of city employees sufficiently to balance the budget, tolerating some strikes, breaking others; decentralize power, moving some from City Hall to the boroughs and some directly to the people; and end “welfare as we know it”—really end it.

Giuliani has the wit and administrative skills for this task. But it is often ambition, not conscience, that makes cowards of us all, and so far, Giuliani has allowed his political ambition to override his understanding of what yet needs to done. His impressive short-term successes appear to have lulled him into the wishful belief that he can save New York without alienating union members, without empowering parents to break the hold of the education establishment, and without overcoming such deep-seated, structural problems as the city’s tax-consuming welfare system. He cannot.

To go farther, to do what is necessary, is admittedly a formidable challenge. New Yorkers are far from fully reconciled to Giuliani’s local version of the Contract With America, and if the mayor embarks on a more radical course, he will almost certainly find the political going tougher than ever. He has already lost the backing of much of the Republican party by his ill-considered foray into state politics in support of the profligate Mario Cuomo, and his decidedly less-than-wholehearted support for the sinking campaign of Senator D’Amato’s presidential candidate, Bob Dole, will not help. The Liberal party, even in its current pragmatic incarnation, can be expected to tolerate just so much of a retreat from its New Deal heritage before jumping ship. And the Democratic party remains the dominant political organization in the city, loaded with candidates eager to appeal to those who feel the mayor has shortchanged them.

If he opts for a harder course than he has so far dared, Giuliani may soon be one lonely mayor. But he would have right on his side, and who knows what fresh wellsprings of civic energy and hope. These were enough to enable Margaret Thatcher to reverse Britain’s decline, and Ronald Reagan to win the cold war. They might even be enough to save New York.

¹ As the mayor has put it, “There is absolutely no correlation between unemployment and crime. Go look at the Depression. It was one of the safest periods in the history of this country.”