My posts on Oval Office are supposed to be objective thoughts about the race. This post is advocacy, so it goes here.
Rudy Giuliani is going to take some criticism for his handling of 9/11 in the next few days – inadequate radio communication between NYPD and FDNY; the Mayor walking the streets instead of hunkering down in a safe bunker with communication equipment; locating an emergency command center within the
My expectation is that, especially if Rudy posts impressive numbers in tomorrow’s FEC fundraising disclosures, these attacks will intensify.
It seems to me that substantial defenses can be offered to all of the criticisms. Last one first, you don’t really get to know the quality of a person until you see them in extreme circumstances. We got that with Rudy and everyone was, and remains, impressed. It’s simply not exploiting 9/11 to remind people that Rudy did a good job leading
Locating the emergency response center in the WTC in retrospect posed some significant disadvantages as things actually unfolded. But remember that the 1993 attack on the WTC failed to achieve any kind of structural damage to the building. Remember how unthinkable the actual event was when you watched it on TV. No one anticipated this sort of thing outside the realm of military fiction. Without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, this was not a bad decision to have made.
Should Rudy have gone to a safe location? I think it was a good thing that Rudy was on the ground, seeing things with his own eyes – communications networks were disrupted anyway, so Rudy in a bunker would have been even more blind and deaf than he was several blocks away from where the buildings were coming down. He did the right thing by going to the scene.
Communications among the first responders? NYPD and FDNY didn’t want compatible radio systems and actively resisted the idea when it was floated. Should Rudy have forced them, kicking and screaming, to integrate their systems? I question exactly how much good that would have done. Would more firefighters and police have been saved had they been able to talk to one another directly rather than relaying information through a command center? The sad answer is, probably not.
Bernie Kerik? Yeah, turns out he was not altogether a good guy, which I realize is something of an understatement. But then again, we’ve seen plenty of Presidents in the recent past have people who aren’t such good guys around them, too. Scooter Libby. Sandy Berger. David Rosen. And other candidates have personal involvement in some questionable dealings in their pasts. Others lack many years of substantial political experience, at least at the federal level, on both sides of the aisle. If you’re going to hold Rudy Giuliani accountable for not having held Federal elected office in the past, you need to also criticize the relative inexperience with Federal politics of Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, or John Edwards, and the lack of executive or managerial experience against John McCain or Hillary Clinton. So none of the major candidates offers the kind of substantial Federal executive background that, for instance, a Vice-President or Secretary of State could offer.
As for the cleanup, that had to start at some point. Cleanup crews are still finding body parts in the rubble at Fresh Kills and even at Ground Zero. If the city had waited until all the body parts had been found, the ruins of the site would still be there today. It wasn’t disrespectful to the f
The criticisms I’ve heard floated so far seem to be demanding perfection. No one can offer that – not the current President, not Giuliani, not Clinton, not anyone. It’s all well and good to criticize the response to the disaster in retrospect. But the real measure of Rudy’s leadership in those dark hours should be based on the information available at the time. We cannot know the ch
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