Day: August 11, 2007

Paging Mr. Orwell: Rudolph Giuliani may be a liberal on social issues but when it comes to his views on the authority of the government to regulate the lives of its citizens, he is 100 percent conservative.

During his tenure as mayor, Giuliani was in a constant struggle to impose authoritarian rule onto a city known for its liberal, non-conformist culture. At one point, things grew so contentious that America’s Mayor declared it illegal to criticize Himself.

That came as no surprise to locals. For one thing, in March 1994, early in his first year as mayor, he laid out his views on the supremacy of the authoritarian state in remarks during a forum on crime:

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

In other words, life was better back in authoritarianism’s golden age because citizens bowed to the government and kept to their place. Looking ahead from 1994, he seemed to be saying that the only way to quell the disorder in the streets was to bring all the citizens, especially the criminal element of the lower classes, into submission.

In the authoritarian way of thinking, social ills at the root of unrest are unimportant, and will likely resolve themselves after order is imposed. Of course, suppressing the criminal element does not make crime disappear. It just pushes it into someone else’s district.

After eight years of Cheney and Bush shredding the Bill of Rights and ceding power to themselves, it is unsettling to think that more of the same, or worse, could lie ahead under a Giuliani regime. If he becomes the GOP nominee, all he has to do is run a rematch of 2004, pummel the Democrats, as Bush did, with fear politics and the specter of 9/11 — and cakewalk into the White House. Now that is scary.

I’m still on the fence about which candidate to support next year but have been leaning toward Bill Richardson. He’s got more boots-on-the-ground foreign policy experience than all the other candidates in both parties combined. He’s served in cabinet posts, was a member of the House of Representatives and he’s run two successful campaigns for governor of New Mexico, a state that tends to elect more Republicans than Democrats to high office

But Richardson’s appearance Thursday night at the Human Rights Campaign Presidential Forum has given me pause. It’s not just that he said that homosexuality was a choice — an incredibly stupid statement that he later took back — it was his entire performance. He was obviously uncomfortable, and it was clear that he had not given gay civil rights issues an in-depth analysis. (I know the campaign is being run on a shoe-string but was there no one available who could have given him a briefing?)

My sense is, Richardson is not a dyed-in-the-wool bigot but rather a a clueless macho straight guy who was suddenly immersed in the heady waters of gay politics and quickly found himself to be in over his head.

If Richardson had performed so badly in front of any other group — blacks, union members, women, Irish-Americans — his campaign would be in freefall right now. Fortunately, it was only the gays, so hardly anyone will take notice and he can recover.

He can even rehabilitate his image with gays, if he chooses to. All he has to do is introduce himself to a strata of gay life with which he can probably relate — the gay rodeo. As it happens, a golden opportunity presents itself next weekend when the 16th Annual Zia Regional Rodeo, sponsored by the New Mexico Gay Rodeo Association (NMGRA) will be held in Albuquerque.

Maybe someone in the leadership of NMGRA could invite the governor to attend the rodeo so he could get a taste of gay life closer to his own experience, and begin to rehabilitate his campaign after a disheartening presentation on gay issues.