By Jennifer Steinhauer
For those who first dialed into Rudolph W. Giuliani during his “America’s mayor” phase, right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — when he wowed the world with his civic leadership, soaring oratory and unifying largess — the former New York mayor’s racially charged comments about President Obama might seem puzzling.
But Mr. Giuliani’s road to and through City Hall was punctuated with racial controversy.
From his 1993 campaign challenging David N. Dinkins, the city’s first African-American mayor, during which Mr. Giuliani stood with rowdy protesting police officers — some of whom carried signs suggesting that voters should “Dump the washroom attendant!” because Mr. Dinkins had proposed a commission to look into police misconduct — to his writing off a black New Yorker killed by the police as “no altar boy” (though he actually was), Mr. Giuliani has had a complicated relationship with African-Americans.
Of course, Mr. Giuliani’s brusqueness was in no way limited to black New Yorkers. He targeted and disparaged, in no particular order, street vendors, ferret owners, artists who made paintings that offended him, Democrats at every level of government and pretty much anyone who made even minor policy critiques.
“He preferred to use a cannon on a mosquito,” said Bill Cunningham, who ran the first mayoral campaign of Michael R. Bloomberg, who succeeded Mr. Giuliani. “It was not enough to disparage a position or statement. There was some innate need to personalize attacks in order to curry favor with a target group.”
In many ways, Mr. Giuliani’s political career was formed in a tinder box of race. His first campaign against Mr. Dinkins in 1989 was defined by the sense of history many black New Yorkers sought to fulfill by electing Mr. Dinkins, but also by a decade of racial tension in New York. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News who was Mr. Giuliani’s main media adviser in that first campaign, suggested that if his client didn’t win the second time around, “this city is going to turn into Detroit.”
Mr. Giuliani felt burned and hurt by his lack of support among minority voters in his first run for mayor, and worked hard to improve relations with black New Yorkers for his second run. By 1993, the city was besieged by racial tensions between Korean immigrants and blacks, and blacks and Jews, and there was an increasing perception that Mr. Dinkins had lost control. Mr. Giuliani narrowly beat Mr. Dinkins, though he did not make significant gains in support among black voters.
Mr. Giuliani was lauded most in his two terms in office for the reduction in crime, but the improvement was tempered by poor relations between the city’s Police Department and minorities. Most notable was the 2000 killing of the unarmed black man, Patrick Dorismond, outside a city bar, after which Mr. Giuliani made the unusual step of releasing Mr. Dorismond’s sealed juvenile police record and saying that Mr. Dorismond was “no altar boy.” (Mr. Dorismond had been an altar boy, in fact, and had even attended the same Catholic school as the mayor.)
After his failed run at the White House in 2008, Mr. Giuliani stayed largely out of the cauldron of racial discord, as the city became increasingly diverse and far less segregated by neighborhood. But he did wade back into the issue when two police officers were killed in New York late last year after a spate of protests over the police shootings of unarmed blacks across the country. Mr. Giuliani said that most blacks died at the hands of other blacks, noting, “The people who do the most for the black community in America are the police.”
His comments about Mr. Obama this week at a fund-raising event for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin could be a matter of Mr. Giuliani seeking to energize conservatives preparing for a Republican primary contest, in which disparaging Mr. Obama is expected. Or it could be Mr. Giuliani speaking from the heart. Either way, his comments were not new.
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