Yesterday's Asshole

Kevin Drum actually has a point, though I'm not sure he realizes why, exactly:

I don't think it's surprising at all that Hillary Clinton trounced Rudy Giuliani in a recent poll in New York state. It's sort of the flipside of my earlier argument about Hillary being stronger than many people think.

In Hillary's case, my argument is that there are a lot of people who have vague, negative impressions of her from the 90s, and that these people are going to be pleasantly surprised when they see her for the first time in years and she turns out not to be a fire-breathing dragon after all. Maybe it's the soft bigotry of low expectations, but it's real nonetheless. She has nowhere to go but up.

Giuliani is just the opposite.  The average voter has vague, positive impressions of Rudy thanks to his 9/11 heroics, and these people are going to be unpleasantly surprised when they see him for the first time in years and he turns out to be nastier than they remember (not to mention being freighted down by a closet full of skeletons they didn't know about). He has nowhere to go but down.

New York demonstrates this dynamic pretty well. Name recognition isn't an issue since both Clinton and Giuliani are well known there. And unlike the rest of the country, the average New Yorker has good, sharp recent memories of both candidates. The result? Clinton is better liked than in the rest of the country and Giuliani is less liked. The same thing is likely to happen when both candidates go national.

Let's leave Hillary out of this for now and just focus on Rudy.

I'm not sure how widely this is appreciated, but New York City voters are not stupid. Well, not entirely stupid. (Staten Island and certain parts of Northeastern Queens are pretty hopeless, actually.)

Now, the central mystery of Rudy Giuliani is that he is obviously a complete asshole, but he was elected mayor of New York City twice. How could that be? Who would ever willingly vote for an asshole?

Why, New York City voters, that's who. Rudy was never loved by anyone; if he has a puppy, his puppy thinks he's a dick. He's an absolute asshole. Do you want to have a beer with Rudy? No. Why? Because he's an asshole. He's stiff, febrile, cranky, prissy, pissy, angry, annoying, megalomaniacal, irritating, ill-mannered, whiny, self-absorbed, hypocritical, and generally an all-around clown and egotistical douchebag.

But these were all considered positive character traits by the people who voted for him in New York City. We like assholes. We pride ourselves on our assholes. David Dinkins was and is a gentleman, and we hated his ass. Ed Koch was our mayor, and he's about as loveable as something you shit out after eating Gowanus Canal seafood.

I have maybe 735 cousins, and almost all of them are firemen or cops or teachers. A bunch of years ago I was talking to my cousin "C," a firefighter, about Rudy. I'm no longer an NYC resident but I am a Public Sector Employee and so we were enjoying a mutual bitching session about our shitty contracts -- a favorite family pastime. "C" had an interesting observation:

Me: How's your negotiations?

C: Bad. Giuliani's being an asshole.

Me: Too bad.

C: Yeah, but that's his job. I mean, we're assholes too. This city only works the way it's supposed to when we're all assholes who hate each other.

Of course this memory is subject to the same beery haze as are all my other family memories, like my first communion and perhaps my bar mitzvah. (Or maybe I just hallucinated that after too many stale Meister Braus -- do Irish Catholics have Bar Mitzvahs?)

But the central point is, Rudy is yesterday's asshole. 9/11 was a long time ago, and there really aren't any fond NY memories of Rudy. The city? Damn, six years is forever in NYC. All we remember is, he was our asshole... once. Upstate? The upstate NY political scene has shifted radically, in no small part due to HRC. She hasn't been idle, and she is not dumb. Rudy hasn't been around, but she has. Was a Clinton ever going to let a state with as many electoral votes as NY slide to a GOP challenger so easily? Please.

Rudy is running on his reputation as yesterday's asshole. Never say never, but I can't see how someone  whose entire career rests on his rep as a being a total New York City jerk is ever going to win over America's Heartland.

Comments

[Eli]

This city only works the way it's supposed to when we're all assholes who hate each other.

This was actually the basic premise of the Constitution. Our government broke down when the assholes in the legislative branch started licking the assholes in the executive branch instead of kicking them.

[Thers]

This was actually the basic premise of the Constitution. Our government broke down when the assholes in the legislative branch started licking the assholes in the executive branch instead of kicking them.

Well, OK. But you're still not allowed to preside over my briss!

[Jay C.]

As they say in South Boston, Mazel Tov.

Is Rudy allowed to win now that the country has stopped pretending that it cared about NYC?

[dan mcenroe]

Staten Island and certain parts of Northeastern Queens are pretty hopeless, actually.

northeastern queens is changing a bit now that we're being filled up with all these darn foreigners.

but belle harbor and breezy point? write 'em off.

[mike in pr]

Yeah, the more the rest of the country sees of Hillary, the less they'll fall for all that MSM bullshit about her; the more they hear about the real Rudy, the less they'll like him.

Not that I'm a Hillary fan. But any dem is better than any repug. Of course Hillary, Obama, Edwards, and Biden pale in comparison with Gore, Feingold, Kucinich, and Clark.

By the way Thers, did you know the present Mrs. G. is a native of Hazleton, PA?

[¡El Gato Negro!]

¡Integrity, Whiskey, Sexy!

Today's installment:

"Context" and the Lies of the Zombie!

¡Vamanos!

[Teresa Nielsen Hayden]

That line about Gowanus Canal seafood ambushed me. You have a real gift for invective.

You're right about Giulani He really is an asshole. He's also permanently out of patience with the whole "negotiate, compromise, form alliances, work toward consensus" democracy thing. It's not his natural mode of operation. He came off well in the period following 9/11 because the city temporarily needed an autocratic asshole. He's a lot less use if you haven't just been bombed.

I've been checking around on YouTube, and there aren't nearly as many videos of Giulani in drag as I'd expected to find. Surely someone should have put up that footage of him dancing in that 30s-style bias-cut satin number? I remember it fondly. It was on the news, so someone should have it. Rudy was way too comfortable in heels. Do you suppose his campaign people have been sanitizing his history?

[s9]

"Is Rudy allowed to win now that the country has stopped pretending that it cared about NYC?"

No. He is not allowed to win. He was your asshole, and you don't seriously expect us to wipe for you, do you?

O, BTW... some of us on the left coast aren't pretending to care any less about NYC than we ever did. We love you guys just fine— but please, keep your assholes policed, okay? (Or do we have to started sending Californians to the White House again to remind you why it's important to hold up your end of the bargain?)

[Andrew Willett]

...Rudy was way too comfortable in heels.

And it's not just his predilection for drag that's the problem here. It's his predilection for bad drag. Damn almighty, he was a terrifying sight.

[julia]

Queens is not safe territory for wingnuts to anything like the extent that it was, partly because of the immigrants (although I do think that if the aftermath of 9/11 hadn't happened, it would have been much more of a tossup who won the allegiance 0f the increasingly-important south asian vote - there are an awful lot of conservatives in my neighborhood who might have been natural Republicans but never will be after some of the shit they had flung at them by the Queens constituency for Mike Long's little freak show).

Mike and Gloria are as we speak selling Archie Bunker's little house to developers who plan to put up two semi-attached legal two families on it. The people who buy those two families are the people Archie was voting to keep down.

Archie lives in Florida or Westchester now. The kids don't visit.