City Desk: Tough Act to Follow.(NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani)(Brief Article)

Elections typically belong to the news of New York, not its nature, but the mayor's race of 2001 qualifies as an elemental event-not for who won, but for who left and how.

Since New York City has a population greater than that of many states, and many members of the U.N. General Assembly, New Yorkers have acquired an inflated notion of the importance of their politicking. In fact it is the usual municipal game of flattery and robbery, practiced by midgets; the energies of the city simply flow elsewhere, to money, work, and entertainment. Think of the supposedly historic mayors of our lifetime. John Lindsay was gorgeous and dumb. Ed Koch beguiled us, but his tenure was only a pit stop in the Grand Prix of disaster. David Dinkins enjoyed a week's fame as the first black mayor, before he proved to be a self-pitying incompetent. You could count the truly significant leaders of the last three and a half centuries on one hand, and still have a finger left over: Director General of New Netherland Peter Stuyvesant (tough, bigoted); Mayor and Governor DeWitt Clinton (built the Erie Canal); Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall William M. Tweed (built many public works, stole millions); Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (honest, obnoxious).

As the list of even our heroes suggests, success often comes attended with flaws. Four months before the end of his second term as mayor, Rudy Giuliani looked as if he would join this select and deformed company. His achievement was obvious, and colossal. He took a city driven into the valley of the shadow of death by the feebleness of his predecessor, and brought it out. The feral skulked; order returned to public spaces. Giuliani gave ordinary citizens their daily lives, unmenaced by grossness and fear, and he gave politicians the stern lesson that their task was not hopeless, and that the blame for their failures properly rests, not with Spenglerian tides of decay, but squarely with them.

His flaws, though less consequential, were also obvious. He was a bully. He boldly faced down the race hustlers, but he lacked the art to finesse or belittle them, as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan might have done. The year 2000 was a carnival and a psychodrama: He battled cancer, paraded a mistress, and blew up his marriage (though his missus was no prize; any wife who acts in The Vagina Monologues deserves what she gets). As his second term wound down, you could already hear the voice of the History Channel narrator, circa 2010, intoning the banalities of biography: "the rise and the fall . . . saved his city, but not himself . . ."

Then came the attack, and we saw the birth of a god: not the Almighty, but a larger-than-life being who walked through smoke and woe and seldom put a foot wrong. He was a Titan, infused with the pathos of a saint; the cop who could speak to us, the firefighter we could see. He was firm, consoling, anguished; he was everywhere, ...