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Goodbye Rudy Tuesday?

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001, at 5:12 PM ET

To answer your question, Josh, I'd vote for Giuliani again in a New York minute. In my view, he was a superb mayor before Sept. 11. But since Sept. 11, he has been a truly indispensable mayor, suffusing our stricken city with a desperately needed sense of calm, control, and optimism. I think you can make a good case that Rudy has now saved New York City not once but twice--first by making it safe and livable in the 1990s, then by guiding us out from under the rubble of the World Trade Center. Our mayor has shortcomings, to be sure. He can be petty, jealous, and paranoid. But more and more, I'm coming around to the view that great big city mayors have to be somewhat unreasonable people. To get anything done in a place like New York, you have to be aggressive, passionate, and even a bit dictatorial. But if those qualities reflect an immoderate love for one's city and are combined with intelligence and humanity, the result can be the kind of Churchillian leadership we've had from Giuliani over the past two weeks.

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I think Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer, who will face off in the Democratic primary two weeks from now, are both admirable figures in many ways. But I don't think anyone else will have the same ability that Giuliani now has to speed New York's reconstruction and recovery. Partly this is because as unknown quantities, the alternatives to Rudy won't inspire the same public and business confidence that he does, at least at first. They'll have to win people's trust; Giuliani already has it. Moreover, I think a transition of mayoral administrations will inevitably slow things down. As we dig out and rebuild, we're better off with a mayor who has real power and political capital, a mayor who can make certain things happen by giving informal orders. We're also better off with continuity of responsibility in the city's departments and agencies, many of which are struggling to recover from devastation themselves.

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But how can we keep Giuliani? In 1993, Ron Lauder spent a chunk of his family's cosmetics fortune on a campaign to pass a term-limits ballot referendum. It passed. In 1996, Lauder spent another big chunk of change getting a challenge to term limits defeated. As a result, Giuliani can't serve past the expiration of his term on Dec. 31 unless someone finds a loophole in the law.

This bothers me not only because we need Rudy, but because I think term limits are fundamentally anti-democratic. By my lights, voters ought to be able to elect whomever they want for a job, including a person who is currently doing it well. But I think voters also have a right to tie their own hands, however foolish it may be to do so, in the same way that you have a right to get a tattoo you'll be sorry about later. That's the situation New York finds itself in now. Eight years ago we chose to handcuff ourselves and throw away the key by passing Ron Lauder's stupid referendum. And now the indications are that a majority of us wish we could unfetter ourselves.

People who know something about this tell me there is a flaw in the term-limits law that might allow Rudy to resign the day before his term expires and legally run again on the Conservative Party line. But such a move would be both devious and subject to legal challenge. Much better, I think, would be for the New York State Assembly or the New York City Council to straightforwardly pass a bill repealing the term-limits law passed. Lawyers say this is legal. And in my view, it's a perfectly democratic and fair thing to do.

Here's my argument: In some bodies politic, voters can only make law through their elected representatives. In other places, such as New York City and California, voters can make laws both through their elected representatives (the Madisonian way) and directly, through ballot initiatives and referenda (Jeffersonian method). In such places, neither manner of legislating intrinsically supersedes the other. An elected legislature may be afraid to override the directly expressed will of the voters. But in doing so, it merely asserts the powers legitimately granted by those same voters against the power of voters to act directly--just as voters, in such places, have the power to override the decisions made by their representatives. I think it's a little nutty to have two types of democracy co-existing on top of each other in this way, but where they do co-exist, neither system trumps the other. And in this case, representative democracy has a chance to prove its mettle by from saving voters from exactly the kind of hasty mistake they tend to make under direct democracy. It turns out we can remove the tattoo after all!

I should add that I would feel that way whether or not I wanted Rudy for another term. It seems to me that if evidence exists that voters have gotten themselves into a bind where they can't have the person they want in office, their elected representatives have a duty to try to get them out of that predicament. I don't want Rudy's term arbitrarily extended for a year, as some have suggested. That would mean suspending democracy, something that should never happen in the United States. What I'm proposing instead is that we restore democracy by letting voters elect whoever they want for the next four years.

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