The mayor took his pain early on. Tax increases were substantial and hurtful, but they hurt early on, and he had time to recover. |
There was enough dust on his desk to have an archeological dig. |
There was enough dust on his desk to have an archeological dig. |
They brought him up from the minors, and it doesn't look like he can play in the majors yet. |
They haven't given any Democrats any oxygen at all. It's total war: it's like Grant in the Civil War - you attack them at all points and at all times. |
They're not giving Freddy a breath. They're not giving him one news cycle. They step on every one of his stories. |
To a great extent, Giuliani is still St. Rudy. He's still riding high on 9/11, though when it comes down to it, he's going to have a tough time in the Republican primaries as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay rights, pro-abortion rights candidate. |
What does he get out of it? He ceases to be irrelevant. There's chest thumping here. He's saying, 'I'm not irrelevant.' He's in the news. He's dominating the agenda. |
What this says is that the Democratic Party is not a fully functioning party. It means that it has lost its base and some sense of its direction. One of the things that's going on here is a lot of soul searching. . . . There are discussions of the old tribal politics being replaced by competence and performance politics. |
You don't throw out a mayor who's got a decent-to-good record. You certainly don't throw him out in favor of an opponent who's got a less-than-compelling message. |