I Just Don’t Get the Rudy Toot!
Sparxafire!
I’m growing more than a tad weary of Rudy Guiliani’s one-note campaign: “Remember how great I was at 9/11?”
At the time of the disaster, I recall watching Guiliani’s appearances on television as being trite and ineffectual. I don’t want to listen to him, I want to see more recovery or hear more about who is behind this attack, etc. He just did what ANY HUMAN would do in his position. Nothing more, nothing less. He walked down there and looked around and even got himself trapped in some tunnel or something. He told the cameras that this was really bad, and that the resources of New York would certainly be brought to bear. Well. Yeah. OK. He watched thousands of New Yorkers walk out of the area… didn’t rally any buses or anything to help the evacuation… just let folks flee the area on foot. Well. OK. I understand that. As any human would, he continued to tell the cameras that the city was doing everything it could. Shrug. I never understood the “WoW” factor for his behavior.
Did he calm and reassure his city? Only to the extent that any human would. Did he restore confidence? Rally the spirit of New Yorkers? I don’t see it. I saw the New Yorkers themselves bouncing back and regaining their own confidence independent of anything the mayor did or did not say or do.
Props to him for going to so many of the funerals of police and firefighters… but again, I think any human would have done that.
This whole “Guiliani as Hero 9/11 Mayor” syndrome is lost on me. I feel a little like I do with the “OJ’s Glove” syndrome. While I watched him put the glove on, everyone else saw it not fitting. He held up his hand, with the glove ON and turned his hand to show us that the glove ON his hand didn’t fit? It was ON his hand! But I’m the only one who noticed.”
The mayor just happened to be there, and reacted as any human normally would. That doesn’t quite fill the bill for the presidency. We need a president who is a preventer of disaster, not a good mopper-upper.
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