Four more years

By Lawrence Henry
web posted October 1, 2001

On September 11, my wife was in Manhattan. If I had known
she was on Wall Street that morning - had, indeed, just gone
through the PATH train station under the World Trade Center at
8:45 - I would have been far more worried than I was. Her usual
travel route took her much farther uptown. Cut off from cell
phone access or the ability to dial any neighboring area code via
land line, I sent her an e-mail message titled, "Are you there?"

She responded, as did so many workers and commuters that
day, within a couple of hours. E-mail worked where telephones
wouldn't. As soon as I had found out she was all right, I wrote to
her, "There are two things we can be grateful for: That Rudy
Giuliani is Mayor of New York, and not any of those doofuses
who are running against him; and that George W. is President,
not Al Gore."

Now Rudolph Giuliani is, according to the mainstream press,
sending "mixed signals" about wanting to stay on as Mayor -
maybe for three more months, maybe for another term. This
morning (October 1) in the New York Times, columnist Bob
Herbert condemned the Mayor in what is becoming typical
language, accusing him of having "a rapidly swelling head." Other
commentators have scored Giuliani for confusing the admiration
he earned for his superb administration of the terrorist crisis with
some kind of political mandate, accusing him of trying to turn a
catastrophe to his own selfish gain.

As usual among the chattering classes, simplicity eludes them.
New York City's very survival is on the line. The next Mayor will
control an unprecedented hoard of cash, both from charitable
contributions and from federal and state subsidies. The next
Mayor will broker redevelopment deals and decide issues, large
and small, relating to the economic life of America's capital city.

Within adult memory, New York City has been bankrupt.
Remember the headline, "Ford to New York: 'Drop Dead'"?
That was only 25 years ago. New York, in truth, has, in the
modern age, been poised on the knife edge of economic
oblivion. It's an intimidatingly expensive and difficult place to do
business, to live, to move around, and to survive. Imagine the
slate wiped clean, New York empty of all business, with no
more grand New York momentum, no more glittering New
York mystique: Would you, as the owner of a corporation,
decide to locate there?

Probably not.

Now, in the aftermath of this disaster, a great many companies
will find it very, very hard to justify staying in Manhattan. Just this
past weekend, a visitor to our house, the boss of the security
division of a major financial corporation, which had been located
right next door to the World Trade Center, was lamenting what
might be the dissolution of his key corporate shop. His
employees won't come back. Several have left to take jobs for
other divisions of his corporation. His operation is scattered
among emergency locations ranging across 150 miles of New
Jersey.

That story has been told over and over, hundreds of times in
hundreds of saddened living rooms, in this area.

Whoever runs New York City in the next four years is going to
have to cut sweetheart deals with big businesses: tax breaks,
public-private partnerships for real estate development, revenue
bonds, and the like. He is going to have to bust the opportunistic
corrupters all along the way. He's going to have to rebuild and
restart the greatest urban economic engine in America's history.

Fernando Ferrer, Mark Green, and Michael Bloomberg can't do
it. They can only pour money down various special interest
ratholes, like public education. Their constituencies will enslave
them to balkanized racial and ethnic pleadings, to unions, to self-
styled "consumerists" and "public interests." They will kill off "tax
breaks for the wealthy." They will kill New York.

Look: I'm an old-time urban rat, a writer, a musician, and an
artist. If I were single today, I'd be living in someplace like
Battery Park City. I've lived downtown in New York, Los
Angeles, and Boston. But I know that, without big business,
there is no jazz, there is no dance, there is no theater, there is no
art, there is no literature in a big city. The overflow of capitalist
dynamism makes big cities what they are. And there's never
been a city where that was so true as New York.

Rudy Giuliani knows it. He was born to do this job, and he sees
the looming peril of New York's future clearly. His offer to talk
to the mayoral candidates about a three-month extension? That
was always a ploy, a bluff.

He knew that at least one of the candidates wouldn't go for it.
That clears the stage for Giuliani to engineer an outright run,
somehow to get around the term-limits law. He's got only a few
weeks to do it, and yes, it is a breathtaking piece of political
audacity.

Thank heavens he's doing it. Because there's a simple choice:
You can vote for the Big Apple, or you can vote for Calcutta on
the Hudson.

Lawrence Henry is a regular contributor to Enter Stage Right.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com