 |
| Sent in the Clone. |
Let us hope our next President is as good an administrator as Giullani! He can't come too soon with the mess we have now. m/r
Disgraceful Dinkins | FrontPage Magazine
By Bruce Bawer On July 19, 2013 I owe David Dinkins a lot.
I was reminded of this debt the other day, when the New York Times ran an item headlined “Dinkins, in Book, Blames Racism for Re-election Loss.”
The story was, quite simply, this: Dinkins, who defeated Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 election for mayor of New York and was beaten by Giuliani four years later, is about to come out with a memoir in which he says the following about his 1993 defeat: “I think it was just racism, pure and simple.”
In other words, New York voters were apparently more racist in 1993 than in 1989.
As it happens, I was a New York City voter when Dinkins and Giuliani first faced off against each other. It was a time when the city was in desperate need of competent and courageous leadership. The streets were pigsties; crime levels were sky-high; prostitutes and drug merchants hawked their wares on midtown avenues without apparent fear of arrest. As George L. Kelling recalled many years later in City Journal, Bryant Park, directly behind in the New York Public Library, was “an open-air drug market” and Grand Central Terminal “a gigantic flophouse.” The garbage-filled, graffiti-covered subways had been all but taken over by gangs of thugs, causing ridership to plummet; for motorists, meanwhile, stopping for a light at certain intersections meant having your windshield assaulted by some hobo wielding a wet, filthy squeegee and demanding money. The Port Authority Bus Terminal, with its armies of beggars, pickpockets, addicts, and, for all one knew, zombies, was the ninth circle of hell, a gallery of modern urban ills at their worst. (Admittedly, it’s still not exactly heaven.) Indeed, the whole 42nd Street/Times Square area was one big cesspit of humanity, where you felt you could catch a deadly disease just walking down the sidewalk.
All this needed to be fixed, and pronto. But who was up to the task? Objectively, there was no contest.
The story was, quite simply, this: Dinkins, who defeated Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 election for mayor of New York and was beaten by Giuliani four years later, is about to come out with a memoir in which he says the following about his 1993 defeat: “I think it was just racism, pure and simple.”
In other words, New York voters were apparently more racist in 1993 than in 1989.
As it happens, I was a New York City voter when Dinkins and Giuliani first faced off against each other. It was a time when the city was in desperate need of competent and courageous leadership. The streets were pigsties; crime levels were sky-high; prostitutes and drug merchants hawked their wares on midtown avenues without apparent fear of arrest. As George L. Kelling recalled many years later in City Journal, Bryant Park, directly behind in the New York Public Library, was “an open-air drug market” and Grand Central Terminal “a gigantic flophouse.” The garbage-filled, graffiti-covered subways had been all but taken over by gangs of thugs, causing ridership to plummet; for motorists, meanwhile, stopping for a light at certain intersections meant having your windshield assaulted by some hobo wielding a wet, filthy squeegee and demanding money. The Port Authority Bus Terminal, with its armies of beggars, pickpockets, addicts, and, for all one knew, zombies, was the ninth circle of hell, a gallery of modern urban ills at their worst. (Admittedly, it’s still not exactly heaven.) Indeed, the whole 42nd Street/Times Square area was one big cesspit of humanity, where you felt you could catch a deadly disease just walking down the sidewalk.
All this needed to be fixed, and pronto. But who was up to the task? Objectively, there was no contest.
No comments:
Post a Comment