Word: mayor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late summer, when a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was brutalized by New York City police officers. The officers attacked him savagely, first beating him and then sodomizing him with a toilet plunger. During the incident, one of the officers allegedly remarked, "It's Giuliani time,"suggesting that the Mayor had embraced a laissez faire attitude toward police brutality. Finally, the embattled New York liberals had their issue...
Regardless of the fact that the Mayor explicitly condemned the action and launched a full investigation into it, his opponents succeeded in portraying the Louima case as evidence of a dark, unseemly element in Giuliani's New York. Al Sharpton and Messinger, then the Mayor's two principle Democratic opponents, attacked Giuliani for his anti-crime zeal, framing the issue of "law and order" as a battle between crime prevention and the safety of the underprivileged--a battle in which the Mayor was on the wrong side. According to them, the fact of the Louima case somehow counterbalanced...
...since then, the Mayor's opponents have done far more than simply insist on an indefensible moral equivalence between a 60 percent decline in violent crime and the brutalization of a single man. In the aftermath of the Louima incident, the liberal camp has devised a more comprehensive "spin" on New York's renewal in general, one with far wider potential application. The liberals now attack New York's unprecedented success in fighting crime by arguing that crime prevention is for the white and wealthy. They frame the situation as follows: the police protect the privileged and beat the poor...
...Mayor's opponents then follow this reasoning further, taking crime prevention as a metonymy, a part for the whole. They insist that the Mayor's "law and order" stance simply reflects the sensibilities of his broader program for New York. Therefore, all his initiatives are tainted: quality of life improvements are for the rich, parks restoration is for the rich, tax reforms are for the rich, neighborhood renewal programs are for the rich. I'm just waiting for the Yankees' World Championship title to be dismissed as yet another perk...
...urban renewal itself. Any progress cities make, you see, must favor the rich. The liberals have shown their cards: one of their new lines of attack will be to simply dismiss urban renewal prima facie as running contrary to the interests of their primary constituencies. And, although the Mayor seems sure to win this particular election, this new argument appears to be an "up-and-comer...