Joke of the Day (Tina Fey, on How Her ‘Restless Leg Tour’ Differed From ‘SNL’)

“This really feels just like S.N.L. Except that we will be in bed by 10. And I don’t have to go to a weird Tuesday night dinner with Lorne Michaels and Rudy Giuliani.” — American actress, comedian, writer, and producer Tina Fey, on her “Restless Leg Tour” with Amy Poehler,  quoted by Jason Zinoman, “Between Friends, an Endless Barrage of Jokes,” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2024

I wonder how late Fey and Poehler had to stay up in the week before the SNL 50^th anniversary special?

Well, at least she didn’t have to attend dinner with the one-time “America’s Mayor.” Which brings up the question: which was weirder—a dinner conversation with Giuliani or the fact that so many once did consider him “America’s Mayor”?

(The image accompanying this post, showing Amy Poehler and Tina Fey at the premiere of Baby Mama in New York City at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, was taken Apr. 23, 2008, by David Shankbone.)

Essay: From ‘America’s Mayor’ to Marshal Petain of Trumpism: The Fall of Rudy Giuliani

Jake Tapper: “But why do think Mitt Romney is a hypocrite if he is saying...”

Rudy Giuliani: “Because Mitt Romney did things very similar to that.”

Tapper: “Taking information from Russians?”

Giuliani: “No, no. There's nothing -- there's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.”

Tapper: “There's nothing wrong with taking information...”

Giuliani: “It depends on where it came from. It depends on where it came from. You're assuming that the giving of information is a campaign contribution. Read the report carefully.”

Tapper: “Mm-hmm.”

Giuliani: “The report says, we can't conclude that, because the law is pretty much against that. Do you think -- people get information from this person, that person, this person….”

Tapper: “So you would -- you would have accepted information from Russians against a client -- against a candidate if you were running in the presidential election?”

Giuliani: “I probably -- I probably wouldn't. I wasn't asked. I would have advised, just out of excess of caution, don't do it. I will give you another thing, though….”

Tapper: “But you're saying -- but you're saying there is nothing wrong with doing that. You -- I mean, that...”

(CROSSTALK)

Giuliani: “There's no -- there's no crime.”— Rudy Giuliani and Jake Tapper quoted in Eli Watkins, “Giuliani: 'There's Nothing Wrong With Taking Information From Russians,'” CNN.com, April 21, 2019

When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, few spectacles were as mortifying to the nation’s patriots as Marshal Philippe Petain acting as head of the new puppet Vichy regime. Parents who had once named their children after the general who had saved his country through victory at Verdun recoiled as he collaborated with Hitler’s henchmen, assisting in rounding up the nation’s Jews. The defender of France’s security was now giving a hand to its greatest menace.

More than a few Americans are experiencing that same visceral shock—a compound of disappointment, sadness and rage—at the ghastly public metamorphosis of Rudy Giuliani. In the 1980s and 1990s, he had made his mark in the cultural, media and financial capital of the United States—undermining the rule of mob capos and Wall Street pirates as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, bringing down crime as Gotham’s Mayor, and, at the conclusion of his two terms in office, responding to the 9/11 attacks with sure-footed leadership. “America’s Mayor,” he was lionized by Oprah Winfrey. 

If Giuliani demanded loyalty in those years, he also inspired it. But now, his aides and admirers are entitled to ask what happened to turn him into the splenetic, often unhinged legal pit bull for Donald Trump. 

Defense rather than prosecution has not proven a comfortable fit for Giuliani. Inconsistencies, gaffes, and questionable readings of the law have been the order of the day, calling into account not just his integrity but even his competence, including:

*saying, “Truth isn’t truth”;

*complaining about “Stormtrooper” tactics used in raiding the offices of former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen when he himself as U.S. Attorney ordered very public “perp walks” for Wall Street execs just arrested; 

*claiming Cohen had “lied all his life,” only weeks after saying he was “honest”;

*denying that Donald Trump Jr. knew he was meeting with Russian government representatives at Trump Tower, when publicly available e-mail messages demonstrated he was; 

*claiming Trump was “immune” from subpoenas by special counsel Robert Mueller, when Supreme Court decisions related to Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton indicated the contrary.

Like Petain, Giuliani’s executive ability and judgment may have atrophied through inactivity, but disquieting moral flaws had also been present in each for a while. With Petain, it was anti-Semitism; with Giuliani, it was vindictiveness toward anyone who disagreed with, let alone crossed, him.

This has not gone unnoticed by a number of people who once thought the world of Trump, such as neoconservative commentator Max Boot: “One can only imagine what Mayor Giuliani would have said if someone had called the cops ‘stormtroopers’ — the epithet that he has now applied to his former law-enforcement colleagues who are investigating the president’s personal lawyer.”

The ex-mayor’s deterioration, which began in earnest with his bulging-eyed, wildly gesticulating denunciation of Hillary Clinton at the 2016 GOP convention, only worsened during his interview with Jake Tapper.

Those latter remarks cannot be dismissed simply as a lawyer providing his client with his constitutional right to a vigorous defense, or even as an exercise in spin characteristic of this era of hyperpartisanship. Rather, they lay down a marker for future Russian interference with the 2020 election. 

Foreign interference in American affairs is hardly an example simply of political hardball, but instead represents a threat recognized even as the U.S. Constitution was being debated, according to Matt Ford in The New Republic:

“In the late eighteenth century, the Founding Fathers feared the possibility that corrupt foreign influence would subvert American institutions more than almost any other potential threat to the early republic. They worried that the nation’s future leaders would be more interested in obtaining and holding power than in sustaining the values of a healthy nation. By seeking to turn elections into a playground for foreign powers, Giuliani and Trump have proven them right.”

To put this in context, remember this: as recently as two years ago, even Trump at his then-most brazen felt compelled to change the motive of son Don Jr.’s meeting with Russians at Trump Tower from an attempt to get damaging information about Ms. Clinton to adoption procedures. Now, Giuliani is saying that even the scrounging for dirt would not have been a problem.

Please take note of another aspect of that remark: a statement from the White House or even the wider Republican Party that he misspoke. In other words: it’s all okay by them. That contrasts with this past January, when The New York Times reported that Trump aides were “exasperated” with Giuliani for allowing that Trump may have been involved in talks over building Trump Tower in Moscow all the way to Election Day in 2016. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Giuliani tried to walk back his statement.)

Yet this follows a pattern in which Giuliani has argued that something would not be “a crime” after the White House had spent months denying that such a situation had occurred. Also in 2018, Giuliani had claimed no crime would have been entailed in any payoffs to ensure Stormy Daniels’ and Karen McDougal’s silence about their alleged affairs with Trump.

Previously, I identified Giuliani as a member of Trump’s “pig pen.” But it is bone-chilling to consider how this relationship developed. With his loud braying about loyalty and his electoral claim that he could shoot a man in the streets and still retain his supporters, the President has developed a Capone-like brazenness, practically daring to be caught. 

In effect, then, Giuliani has devolved from boss nemesis of the Eighties to boss mouthpiece today. He has become everything that he once denounced and battled with every fiber of his being.

When Giuliani and Trump rose to fame in New York in the 1980s, they didn’t seem particularly close. Arguably, their personalities even diverged, with Giuliani eyeing his climb from crusading prosecutor to elective office with utmost seriousness while Trump cultivated an image as a fabulously rich playboy developer. That makes their current relationship all the more curious.

There are those who would say that the Giuliani we know today was really there all along. “Rudy’s demeanor left a trail of resentment among the dozens of federal judges in Manhattan, many of whom had worked in that U.S. attorney’s office,” former FBI Director James Comey wrote in his memoir, A Higher Loyalty. “They thought he made the office about one person, himself, and used publicity about his cases as a way to foster his political ambitions rather than doing justice.”

Furthermore, a 2005 book edited by my college classmate and friend Rob Polner, America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York, catalogued the less praiseworthy aspects of the Giuliani mayoralty. In what seems increasingly like prophecy, it warned that, given his track record, his already-apparent attempt to reach higher office should be regarded with extreme caution.

Where did it all go wrong for Giuliani? Early polls in the 2008 campaign showed him as the GOP front-runner, but he never gained traction with the party’s base, which had less and less use for a Northeastern regarded not just as part of a governmental system they regarded with suspicion but even as a “moderate.” (When he left his second wife, he stayed for six months in a midtown apartment lent by two gay friends.)

His consulting work, an increasingly common means for Presidential contenders to bide one’s time for future office by fattening the wallet, left his legal skills rusty. Actually, it did far worse, according to Andrew Kirtzman, a former New York journalist and current president of an eponymous bipartisan political consulting firm. In a May 2018 interview with Isaac Chotiner of Slate, Kirtzman, author of Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City, noted: “He took a whole bunch of clients who were foreign dictators, and others who were unsavory, and he geared his efforts towards making money and also playing in a sketchy international realm.”

Much of the GOP on Capitol Hill, faced with Trump’s serial mendacity, have maintained an embarrassed silence. Not Giuliani. He has impugned the motives of accusers on questionable evidence and excused the inexcusable. 

One question arises: Why has he become such a Trump lapdog? Why has he so aggressively filled a post that others avoided because of the necessity of defending an undisciplined, disobedient client?

Is it because Giuliani couldn’t resist being part of the political conversation, even if it meant he would not get a coveted post like Attorney-General or Secretary of Homeland Security? Did he need the money to pay for what surely will be an expensive divorce from his third wife?

I suspect that something else may be involved. Whether parading in front of the cameras as a prosecutor, haranguing opponents at City Hall, or embarking on an extramarital affair, Giuliani has been bent on proving he is an alpha male. 

But after his good-soldier appearances on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 campaign after the “Access Hollywood” tape—when all other surrogates for the candidates canceled their weekend TV appearances—Trump dressed down Giuliani in front of staffers for being too apologetic. 

“I've never seen a worse defense of me in my life,” Trump raged, according to Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. “They took your diaper off right there. You're like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?" Then, moving in for the kill with the ultimate Trump putdown: “You’re weak, Rudy. You lost it.”

For all his willful ignorance about public policy, Trump has honed an unerring instinct in his professional dealings with World Wrestling Entertainment that has made him a dangerous wielder of power: how to psychically emasculate someone, even a politician like Giuliani with experience he could not match. That humiliation ritual worked to perfection with Giuliani, who has never apologized for any Trump action since.

Like France’s Third Republic—the regime that fell, giving way to Petain—21^st-century America has been rendered vulnerable by corruption, political polarization, and economic dislocation. Particularly on the GOP side, it is a landscape marked by equal parts fear and opportunism, with longtime political operatives like Giuliani betting that by collaborating with Trump, they will continue to make their mark in public life with no consequences for themselves. 

Giuliani and his like had better think again about what it means to deal with a capricious head of government ready to change his mind and his loyalty on the merest whim. One man who could tell him about what can ensue would be Lord Hastings, facing death at the hands of the man he had once foolishly given his allegiance to in Shakespeare’s Richard III: 

“O momentary grace of mortal men,

Which we more hope for than the grace of God!

Who builds his hope in air of your good looks

Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,

Ready with every nod to tumble down

Into the fatal bowels of the deep.”

(The accompanying photo of Rudy Giuliani was taken by Gage Skidmore at an August 2016 immigration policy speech hosted by Donald Trump in Phoenix, Arizona.)

Trump’s Advisers: Kitchen Cabinet—or Pig Sty?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Tuesday night, speculation now turns to the informal advisers who might influence his decisions. In the past, this group of supporters, well-wishers and friends who had Presidents’ ears were known as the “kitchen cabinet.” (The term dates back to the quartet that Andrew Jackson consulted, often far more assiduously than his regular Cabinet.) Teddy Roosevelt’s similar group was nicknamed, in keeping with that President’s hyperactive physical fitness regimen, the “Tennis Cabinet.”

I can’t imagine, however, given how little interest our President-elect has in history, that he will recall these nicknames. Nor do they adequately convey the nature of  his shameless surrogates at the tail-end of the primary season and throughout the general election.

Historian Ken Burns has called the full assembly of GOP officials who threw in their lot with Donald Trump “Vichy Republicans,” and though this captures the sense of their collaboration with evil and madness, it is neither pungent nor precise enough to describe the particular men (and it is all men) who came to cling to him as a way of keeping their hand in the political game when their fortunes were on the wane. No, only one name will do for this group: The Pig Sty.

That name evokes more than merely disgust over their opportunistic loyalty to a reality-show star manifestly unsuited to the Presidency. It also describes their treatment of women—starting with those in their personal and professional orbits, and proceeding to the Democratic candidate. No surprise in that: Like their candidate, they all belong (psychologically if not chronologically) to the era of Mad Men, when political and business leaders regarded women as playthings rather than people.

You might notice that they all have developed a noticeable stoop. This is not simply a function of their age (ranging from middle age to senior citizen), but because they carried so much water for Trump throughout his scorched-earth campaign.

Let’s examine what each brings to the table, shall we?

Chris Christie: Leading off with the governor of New Jersey was a no-brainer, considering that his photo—of noticeably porcine proportions—embodies literally, not just metaphorically, the inhabitants of this pig pen. Millions of Americans watched him at the Republican Convention, inciting the rabid crowd to chant “Lock her up!” against Ms. Clinton. More recently, many New Jerseyans wanted to shout the same thing at him when virtually the only point of agreement between prosecution and defense during the Bridgegate trial was that he’d approved the mad scheme to close two of three Fort Lee access lanes into the George Washington Bridge. Nor did it escape the nearly 80% of his state’s residents who now disapproved of his performance that he’d heaped all kinds of abuse on his former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly—first (according to her uncontested testimony at the trial) by hurling a water bottle and cursing her out on one occasion, then by hiring—at state expense—a Republican-connected law firm that, before exonerating Christie of wrongdoing, accused her of orchestrating the bridge closures—and including the gratuitous detail that the single mother of four had been involved in an affair with former Christie campaign manager Bill Stepien. That last episode constitutes what a Daily Beast article has slammed as “Slut-Shaming.”

Newt Gingrich: The former Speaker of the House and GOP Presidential candidate earned Trump’s gratitude toward the end of last month when he angrily dismissed questions from Fox News' Megyn Kelly about multiple sexual misconduct charges against Trump by claiming that she was “fascinated by sex.” More than a few viewers of the exchange observed that it was Gingrich, not Kelly, who was “fascinated by sex.” How else to explain how he married second wife Marianne only six months after divorcing his high-school geometry teacher, amid acknowledgement from congressional staffers that he’d been conducting an affair; or how, 19 years later—amid impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton that Gingrich had initiated related to the Monica Lewinsky affair—the now-ex-Speaker broke with wife #2 to make way for a “breakfast companion” 23 years his junior. (See this Washington Post article about his messy marital history.)

Rudy Giuliani: His descent since hooking up with Trump has been the most frightening to behold of all these figures. Even close aides from his days as a crusading U.S. District Attorney and Mayor of New York have admitted to dismay over his vein-popping, bug-eyed appearances before the GOP convention and on cable news shows, with one quoted in a New York Times article as finding his old boss to be "painful to watch." He ranted on and on about Clinton, so eager to wound her that he couldn’t see the collateral damage to his own reputation. While stating that Mrs. Clinton could only have been a fool not to have suspected her husband of cheating on her, he never saw the natural rejoinder: Was his own ex-wife, Donna Hanover, also being a “fool” for trusting him? Similarly, in fanning rumors, offered up with only the flimsiest of evidence, that Ms. Clinton might be suffering from Parkinson’s, he suggested that listeners Google “Hillary Clinton” and “health”—totally oblivious to the idea that many were finding far more substantiated information by searching for “Rudy Giuliani” and health. Altogether, he seems to have dragged into the sunlight something monstrous from the darkest recesses of his soul.

Roger Ailes: He might have been forced out of his longtime perch at Fox News, but not before performing significant service at the conservative network. He created the echo chamber that would broadcast such dubious stories as Clinton’s imminent indictment for violations relating to the Clinton Foundation. The same network exec whose creation lashed Bill Clinton in the 1990s for sexual harassment has himself now been accused of the same offense by considerably more women (more than 20, if you’re keeping count, according to this piece from the Huffington Post). Naturally, the candidate who talked about “grabbing p---y” made this same disgraced TV executive part of the team preparing him for the debates against Mrs. Clinton.

Roger Stone: A political black arts operative par excellence, he “confirmed” Trump’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of JFK. He also peddled the phony National Enquirer story that the U.S. Senator from Texas had engaged in extramarital affairs. Of course, this was the same operative fired from Bob Dole's 1996 Presidential campaign after news broke that Stone and his wife had placed ads seeking swinging partners. (Elizabeth Preza's article from Alternet this past May had all the dirty details about this dirty trickster.)

Corey Lewandowski: During primary season, Trump’s first campaign manager ran into trouble because of a scuffle with a female reporter. This was not the first time he got in-your-face with a woman: In one dispute while he was at the Koch-funded super PAC “Americans for Prosperity,” he called one the “C” word. (See Francis Langum's article from the blog "Crooks and Liars" about this "big guy henchman" who's more than a little reminiscent of Richard Nixon's H.R. Haldeman.)

In a May 2016 article in The Atlantic that answered the question, “What Is the Greatest Prank of All Time?”, Candid Camera host Peter Funt nominated Trump’s Presidential campaign—“the 2016 reality-TV show that has convinced many people that Martians have taken over the GOP.” The Trump Pig Sty befouled the atmosphere enough that, if Funt were to consider it now, he’d have to write, “taken over America.”

Quote of the Day (Rudy Guiliani, on John Lindsay)

“John Lindsay defined an era in the life of New York City. He embodied the hopes of a generation after the death of John F. Kennedy, a time of discord, rebuilding, and re-birth, when all the action in our nation—for better and for worse—seemed to be taking place in our cities. He made New York City a symbol for urban America, by speaking out about what he believed was wrong, discussing what he believed could be made right, and proposing solutions whose legacy we live with today. There is no question that he had an enduring impact on the City that he loved. His energy, his optimism—and yes, his charisma—made him a national figure during the time he lived at Gracie Mansion.”— Rudolph W. Giuliani, Eulogy at the Memorial Service for Mayor John V. Lindsay, Friday, January 26th, 2001, delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

The half-lives of politicians—how, step by step, their vibrancy ebbs once they are out of the public eye—are rarely a happy sight. But John V. Lindsay’s seemed particularly sad and harrowing, especially in light of the “energy…optimism…and charisma” rightly noted by his fellow GOP member who followed him to Gracie Mansion two decades after he left it, Rudy Guiliani.

Lindsay died on this day 15 years ago in Hilton Head, S.C. He was far from the city that had elected him mayor twice, and, at age 79—battered by financial reverses, two strokes, Parkinson’s Disease and complications from pneumonia—even further away from the golden 44-year-old politician whose initial City Hall candidacy had inspired the memorable Murray Kempton line, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.”

Expectations, created by the likes of quotes like this, had become unrealistically high by the time he took over in January 1966. ''John Lindsay was the best mayor New York ever had before he took office,'' a press aide to his predecessor, Robert F. Wagner, is supposed to have quipped, according to the New York Times obit after Lindsay's death.

That predisposition to give Lindsay a pass because of who he was rather than what he had done is not unlike the rhapsodic reception accorded Barack Obama when he became President (including a Nobel Peace Prize awarded before the latter had completed even one year in office). The problem was that Lindsay not only had to campaign but govern. There, the magic vanished.

The similarities between Mayor Lindsay and President Obama did not end with great expectations. There is another, equally important one: the electoral coalition they hoped to count on. They were, in essence, much the same: the young, African-Americans, women, and liberals.

Fred Dutton, a former aide to Robert Kennedy who had moved on to advise George McGovern by the early '70s, saw these newly emerging groups as a means of shedding the Democratic Party’s union leaders, urban bosses, and related groups deemed too blue collar and reactionary. Seeing increasingly little room in the Republican Party for his brand of urban liberalism and this "new politics," Lindsay had switched parties in 1971 and run in the Democratic Party’s primaries the following year.

Lindsay’s electoral problem was not in failing to anticipate the future promised by these new groups (one on which Obama successfully capitalized in 2008 and 2012) but in not negotiating the here and now beforehand. He actually ran to the left of McGovern in 1972, but the South Dakota Senator had stolen a march on him in winning the support of these voters by using recent rule changes regarding composition of convention delegates to his advantage.

Worse than that, Lindsay disastrously exhibited early in his administration an almost aristocratic disdain for unions. This immediately complicated his relationship, in his first days in office, with the fiery Irish-born Transport Workers Union head Michael J. Quill, who contemptuously referred to the new mayor as “Lindsley.” 

The resulting strike, which lasted 13 days, immediately cost the city, in lost productivity and wages, an estimated $1.5 billion. Moreover, the eventual deal--$52 million for two years, double the size of any transit pact negotiated by Mr. Wagner—set a standard that other unions would try to match.

Over the following eight years, Lindsay would contend with strikes or sick-outs by the city’s police, teachers, bridge workers, sanitation workers, and firemen. To close the growing deficits spawned at least partly by these work actions, he pressed for a new municipal income tax--along with a new commuter tax--that managed to simultaneously alienate two groups who could not normally agree on anything: business leaders and blue-collar workers. (See a prior post of mine that contrasted the 1966 strike with one that had a more successful outcome: the 1980 transit strike under Ed Koch.)

For all his fierce unpopularity with a large portion of the electorate, Lindsay was fortunate that he didn’t have to face them when the bills for all this labor largesse had to be paid. By 1971, according to Ken Auletta’s The Streets Were Paved With Gold, the Lindsay administration had not only vastly overestimated its forecast of federal aid, but also issued more than $300 million of budget notes to cover inflated revenue estimates. The following year, it rolled up these notes with a new set. Through these budget gimmicks, the city was living beyond its means, setting the stage for the 1975 municipal bankruptcy crisis.

Inevitably, any historical assessment of Lindsay must take this fiscal irresponsibility into account. That does not bode well for his ultimate reputation. But other aspects of his work and career need also to be entered into the ledger. Ironically, the person who made one of the most eloquent and surprising cases for him is someone he had precious little in common with him.

In some ways Giuliani can be thought of as the ultimate anti-Lindsay: ethnic Catholic rather than WASP; a charm-challenged figure versus one whose affability was effortless and genuine; a Republican who quelled his maverick instincts enough to remain within the party fold, rather than one who found a more congenial home in the Democratic Party; a baseball rather than tennis fan; a politician whose base was the outer boroughs rather than Manhattan; and a chief executive acclaimed for rising to the occasion in a crisis, instead of one who seemed to fold his tent quickly when pressed by opponents. 

But once in awhile, politicians can sound unexpected grace notes. Guiliani’s came not merely in how he spoke of Lindsay after his death, but in how he had come to his aid before that.

Lindsay left City Hall a spent force in 1973, with even Kempton now calling him a "splendid flop." His last campaign, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1980, ended with his defeat in the primary. Then, in the 1990s, two law firms with which he had been associated went bankrupt.  Surprisingly, a man associated with patrician, prep-school privilege had no health insurance and, under city rules of that time, no pension eligibility. All of this occurred as his health began to fail.

Enter Guiliani. Upon becoming mayor, he had been impressed by Lindsay’s graciousness in a long chat they had at Gracie Mansion. Amazingly, he even felt something of a kinship with the liberal as another politician who had tried to reform the old political system. Now, with other friends, he was able to secure for the former mayor a position as special counsel to the City Commission for the United Nations, with health coverage, a $25,000-a-year salary, and, under rules that had more recently gone into effect, enough time to qualify for the 10 years needed for a city pension.

In one sense, Guiliani may have been overly generous in stating in his eulogy that his predecessor had “an enduring impact on the City that he loved.” Unlike Fiorello LaGuardia, Ed Koch, Guiliani or Michael Bloomberg, Lindsay was not a transformative figure who either left the lives of New Yorkers demonstrably better off or changed the physical or operational landscape of the city. The perception grew under him that, far from being the “Fun City” he hailed, New York was an ungovernable one.

Yet Guiliani was also correct in recognizing, as even many who vehemently disagreed with his policies did (including a conservative friend of mine who told me he was the best interview he ever had) the essential decency and humanity of Lindsay. The problems of race that overshadowed his eight years in office have hardly vanished in America or New York, as events of the past year have shown. The one great achievement of his tenure can be phrased as a negative, but it remains significant for all that: unlike other American cities in the late 1960s, New York did not burn.

Obama at Selma: ‘Faith in the American Experiment’--And Who Really Questions It

“As we commemorate their achievement, we are well-served to remember that at the time of the [Selma] marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them. Back then, they were called Communists, half-breeds, outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse – everything but the name their parents gave them. Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism was challenged.

“And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place?...

“What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”—President Barack Obama, Address on the 50th Anniversary of the Selma, Ala., March for Voting Rights, March 7, 2015

Somehow, a sense of the majesty of the occasion—a commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,” when 600 non-violent activists were set on by state troopers in marching from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights—seems to have stirred Barack Obama to deliver one of the few memorable speeches of his Presidency.

Or maybe, a sense of righteous anger seized him as well: the realization that, a half-century later, another black—not even a protestor this time, but the highest-ranking member of the government—was having his faith questioned, his life threatened, and his patriotism challenged, for no good reason. 

Though this has been happening, of and on, even before he became President, it has been given new resonance now. It is, at heart, "birtherism" all over again in another guise, a virulent controversy about origins with dark roots in many Americans' longtime suspicions of "the other," except this time in far more insidious form, given cover by a man once hailed for leading his city through its greatest crisis. 

If former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani hoped to take Obama down a peg, he failed miserably. Rather than making people wonder about the President, he only made them reconsider why they ever thought so well of himself in the first place.

A Disengaged President Revivified
One of my friends wrote on Facebook that she cried as she listened to Obama’s address on her car radio. Too bad that for much of his time in office, the President didn't speak with this kind of passion, the same rafter-raising rhetoric used in the address at the 2004 Democratic Convention that put him on the national stage. God knows there have been plenty more times since then when he’s terribly disappointed his most ardent supporters and even dismayed those who, like me, while expecting little from a comparative neophyte in Washington, still hoped for the best. And it wasn't simply because the old eloquence--needed so desperately in the last six years to explain the need to redress the rising economic inequality faced by all Americans, black and white--went missing in action.

Rather than running a “passionless Presidency,” as former speechwriter James Fallows charged his old boss, Jimmy Carter, with conducting, Obama could credibly be charged with lapsing into a disengaged one. He didn’t want to prep for campaign debates, make nice with recalcitrant but influential Congressmen—in short, take the time to learn which levers of government needed to be pressed. He looked like he would rather be on a basketball court, a golf course, schmoozing at parties with Hollywood celebrities or picking the brains of academics at conferences—anywhere else but in the Oval Office.

I certainly wish that, instead of going into a defensive crouch when Wall Street and its GOP minions brayed, he had gone after them with hammer and tongs, the same way that Franklin Roosevelt denounced the “economic royalists” who had brought on the Great Depression, throwing down the bold challenge, “I welcome their hatred.”  

Who Really Is "Us"?

No, it took a ceaseless, senseless chorus—joined shamelessly late last month by Mayor Guiliani—to call Obama back to first principles. The marchers at Selma, in demanding that this country simply accord them their rights due as native-born citizens, were, as the President said, engaged in a struggle to “determine the meaning of America”—a struggle that a limited but loud group in this country now seek to negate not just by limiting voting rights, but by restricting the range and rights of citizenship itself.

On the other hand, in a manner that called to mind Richard Nixon at his divisive worst, Guiliani used coded language to this cohort when he addressed a luncheon at New York’s Club 21 for GOP Presidential hopeful Scott Walker. Obama, the former mayor said, wasn’t “brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

You and I. He’s not one of us. He’s—wink, wink—one of them.

But who is “us”? The strength of America derives from the extent to which it has been revitalized by outsiders—immigrants whose labor proved essential in creating new industries. Unfortunately, many of its most shameful moments have occurred when established social groups have practiced exclusion against newcomers or their descendants (or, in the case of African-Americans, people here for centuries, but excluded by law and custom for too long in participating in or benefiting from this country).

Guiliani could look to the experience of his own ethnic group if he wanted to realize at a gut level the unfairness of such exclusion. Throughout much of the 20^th century, bigots could not associate Italian-Americans with anything besides organized crime.

The Perils of Speaking Loosely

What probably happened at that New York luncheon was this: Guiliani was stewing over how Obama was twisting himself into a pretzel over how to refer to the particular strain of religious-motivated terrorism that has bedeviled the world so far in this millennium.

The ex-“America’s Mayor” might be annoyed by what he sees as Obama’s occasional criticism toward the United States. But he has hardly been the first President to do so: In his Personal Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant called the Mexican War, which resulted in additional slave states in the Union, “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”

Obama has been  tiptoeing around calling out a radical minority element of one of the world’s largest religions that is fomenting danger, but Presidents speak loosely about their nation’s opponents at their peril.

In June 1940, before he was set to deliver a commencement address at the University of Virginia, Franklin Roosevelt debated with his wife and aides a last-minute, handwritten insertion into his prepared text. The President’s denunciation of Benito Mussolini for invading France, just when Axis ally Adolf Hitler had put it on the verge of surrender, was as vivid in its way as another last-minute addition in a later, more famous address: “a date which will live in infamy.” 

This time, FDR brushed aside concerns that his words would offend loyal Italian-Americans sensitive about imputations of criminal associations. For better or worse, he would live with the consequences of  “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” I would not be entirely surprised if Guiliani’s parents, their relatives and friends were among those who cringed.

Saying whatever you want, diplomatic niceties be damned, does have consequences for a President. Right after 9/11, George W. Bush’s loose use of “this crusade” in the immediate context of “this war on terrorism” sent aides into full spin mode as they rushed to dash anger on the Middle East "street" over invoking an event  they abominated. For the rest of his tenure in office, he floundered just as much as Obama on how to character the existential threat now faced by the world.

Comparing How "I Was Brought Up" Can Boomerang

In politics and interpersonal relations as well as in diplomacy, speaking loosely can boomerang—and perhaps nowhere so much recently as in Guiliani’s allusion to “the way you were brought up and I was brought up.” More than a few commentators have—ahem—brought up everything in comparing his parentage with that of the man who sparked his criticism. Little if any of it is to Guiliani’s advantage.

Who passed on this alleged lack of patriotism to Obama? His father? But the President spent only one, unsatisfying month with him, at age 10. His mother? Like many young Americans of her generation, Ann Dunham believed in the promise of her country to the world enough to spend years abroad helping developing nations, in her case as a specialist in economic anthropology and rural development.

Guiliani himself dismissed any thought that his allusion to the President’s background was racist by noting that among those who brought him up was a white grandfather. As it happens, that grandparent, Stanley Dunham, served in WWII in Europe as a soldier.

In contrast, the ex-mayor's father, Harold Guiliani, didn’t. He couldn’t: as a felon, convicted seven years before Pearl Harbor of robbing a milkman at gunpoint, he was ineligible to serve. Nor did his son serve in the armed forces during the Vietnam War: when others of his generation were taking a hill, Rudy Guiliani was taking a deferment.

"Socialism" and "Anti-Colonial"--The GOP Phantom Menaces

When questions began to be raised about his remarks, Guiliani only kept digging his hole deeper. He ascribed the sources of the President’s belief to “socialism or possibly anti-colonialism."

One could begin to point out that, during the Cold War, a number of governments allied with the West against the U.S.S.R. were headed by socialists, such as Great Britain under Clement Attlee and France under Francois Mitterrand. But really, the GOP doesn’t object to the the fact of redistribution of wealth inherent in socialism so much as its direction. Since the Reagan Revolution, that redistribution, in the form of tax policy, has been unrelentingly upward.

As for Obama being influenced by “anti-colonialism”—what, really, is so wrong with that? Did Guiliani ever stop to think that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were anti-colonial? If his education doesn’t extend much further than his own experience in politics, he might recall that for a significant part of his former constituency in New York City—Irish-Americans—“anti-colonialism” aimed at longtime British occupiers in their ancestral homeland has been practically part of their DNA. (Take a closer look at those banners at the next New York St. Patrick's Day Parade, Mr. Mayor!)

Going Beyond the Pale: What Guiliani and the GOP Have Wrought
Subsequently, Guiliani disclaimed any intent to question the President’s patriotism, but this was too clever by half.  As a former prosecutor and officeholder, Guiliani is intimately familiar with the meanings and shadings of words. Patriotism is, by definition, love of country. 

Given this, if Guiliani was not saying the President was unpatriotic, his entire statement at the luncheon was nonsense. If he was saying so, the statement was despicable. Choose your poison, sir. You can question another politician's policies, his personality, even his brainpower, but once you question his patriotism--his basic good faith--there is no reasonable expectation that he will ever listen to you again on any conceivable subject.

For a long time, Obama was given credit more for what he represented than for what he had actually achieved, as when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a mere few months into his Presidency. Now, the Republicans blame him more than he deserves for what he represents.

They would be unwise to pursue this line of thought and action. Their criticism of this President’s policies has gone beyond what he does to what he is. If they had ever hoped to peel even a few percentage points out of the long-time Democratic advantage in Presidential elections, they can pretty much abandon it for criticism that is personality-based as opposed to policy-driven. And, by implicitly raising questions about what constitutes a real American, they raise anew  many Hispanic-Americans' suspicions about whether they have any sort of interest in their welfare.

But most of all, the confusion of the Republicans—including Guiliani’s—of criticism of our government with criticism of our country leaves them no justification to operate in honorable dissent in Washington. Throughout his protests, including at Selma, Martin Luther King Jr. simply asked America to live up to its deepest traditions of freedom. The crushing of his dissenting voice, like those of others through the years, would have endangered the U.S. profoundly—leaving its most marginalized group with no means of reform but the most violent action, and exposing this country at the height of the Cold War as a deeply hypocritical clarion of freedom to the world.

The GOP cannot deny the right of dissent to others without limiting their own future freedom of action. Nobody said it better than Harry S. Truman, as McCarthyism—loyalty suspicions run amok—began to take hold in 1950: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."