LEAVE NOW, RUDY!
Editorial

As the new millennium began, NY-1 broadcast live from the Mayor’s command bunker in the World Trade Center. Sometimes it was impossible to tell whether it was a disaster center or his campaign headquarters, but for New York voters that amounts to the same thing.

Rudolph Giuliani has done the impossible by making us long for the good old days of Ed Koch and David Dinkins.

Much as we would like to see Mark Green become mayor a year early, we cannot bring ourselves to hope that Giuliani is elected to the US Senate next November just to hasten his inevitable departure. So long as his fellow Republicans are in the majority in Congress, the prospect of his continuing to impose his right-wing views, this time on the entire country, is dismal.

However, there might be a way to have our cake and eat it too. Last November, Mayor Giuliani declared that the charter-revision vote was a referendum on his mayoralty. Since it was emphatically rejected by a 3-1 margin, shouldn’t he step down?

There is a growing consensus that the mayor has overstayed his welcome, and that the reduction in crime was triggered by Dinkins’ “safe cities, safe streets” program and does not justify Giuliani’s assault on civil liberties and civic democracy, his vindictive social policies and vicious political style. In mid-December, John Cardinal O’Connor, whose courageous struggle against a brain tumor has left him with few words, joined a sickened city in urging Giuliani to rescind his plans to take children away from homeless mothers and to arrest homeless men, yet the mayor persisted until temporarily enjoined by a two-judge panel in state Supreme Court. The Rev. Al Sharpton has pointed out that if Giuliani had been mayor of Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary would have been jailed and Jesus put in a foster care. And outspoken Father Bob Castle of St. Mary’s Church on West 126th Street offered his professional opinion that Rudolph Giuliani will go to hell.

That’s a long journey. Why doesn’t he start now?