AT a most atypical Saturday-night party on the Upper West Side this past weekend — atypical because it was populated by ideological conservatives, a breed as rare in the neighborhood of my birth as the yak — one topic dominated all conversation among the anxious attendees: “How bad are things for Rudy?”
There is profound concern among Mayor Giuliani’s diehard supporters that Hillary Clinton’s surge in the polls this past week isn’t just a momentary blip — that it must be taken as an ominous indicator of trouble ahead in the Senate campaign.
Giuliani should take the concern seriously and begin addressing it as soon as possible. His fans have been counting on the national phenomenon dubbed “Clinton fatigue” to harm Hillary, even in this Democratic state, but it’s begun to dawn on them that “Giuliani fatigue” might be a problem as well.
The mayor’s impolitic and inappropriate response to the police shooting of Patrick Dorismond has cast a harsh light on the uncompromising quality that is simultaneously his greatest strength and his most glaring weakness.
And yet, while Rudy Giuliani is an uncompromising man, there is one activity about which he has shown, and continues to show, a certain ambivalence: His candidacy for Senate. He’s not campaigning very hard, and upstate Republicans have been e-mailing me for weeks with complaints about the invisibility of the Giuliani campaign as Hillary traipses back and forth up there like a cartographer mapping the Mohawk Trail.
More telling, he’s getting into fights that nobody whose primary goal is winning a November election would. His stance on the Dorismond shooting is one example. So is his decision to go to war with interim Schools Chancellor Harold Levy over summer-school plans that don’t involve merit pay.
Don’t get me wrong; I love the idea of Rudy making war on the issue of merit pay. His refusal to keep quiet when Levy and others suck up to an enemy of reform like the United Federation of Teachers is his most refreshing characteristic as a politician. He is what people always say they want politicians to be — he is not in hock to any constituency, he says and does what he believes is right. And he’s what Al Gore only pretends to be — a “fighter” for the best interests of the electorate.
Alas, this is a better moment for a fake “fighter” like Al Gore than a real fighter like Rudy Giuliani. In an election year, it’s important for politicians like Gore who are seen as weak to suggest they’re strong. By contrast, a strong-armer like Giuliani needs to take some velocity off his fastball in an election year, lest he seem too overpowering.
This is where his ambivalence about his Senate race is showing. True, he has raised $19 million for the race. True, he keeps saying he’s running. But he also insists that he has a “full-time job” as mayor and that people have to understand he doesn’t have as much free time as Hillary.
That’s nonsense. Mayors run for higher office all the time, and do so without shirking their responsibilities. Sure, it’s hard to be mayor of New York, but the city is in very good order for the most part. Rudy Giuliani could spend most of his time running for Senate without jeopardizing the health of his city.
The truth, I think, is that Giuliani loves his current job so much he hasn’t reconciled himself to the fact that he will soon be asking the people of the state of New York to elevate him out of it.
It’s no secret that the mayor is running for Senate only because he is limited to two terms in City Hall. But it’s time he committed himself — psychologically as well as politically — to the challenge that is facing him. The only war he should be fighting is the war against Hillary Clinton.
He’s right to keep it a cold war at present, because it’s a long time from April to November. But you still have to spend 18 hours a day fighting a cold war. Giuliani is spending too much time thinking like a mayor and too little time thinking like a Senate candidate.
Nobody prevails in a contest for the affections of voters without having to work hard to earn their votes. That’s the lesson George W. Bush and Al Gore were taught in 1999, and it’s the lesson Rudy Giuliani needs to take to heart — now.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
