Campaign 2000: Who's Sorry Now?

Last week Hillary Clinton was a better mayor of New York City than the man who holds the job. Commenting on the most recent killing of an unarmed man, Patrick Dorismond, by an undercover narcotics cop, Clinton told a congregation at the Bethel A.M.E. Church, "I do not believe that bad relations with the police is a necessary cost of doing the business of keeping our cities safe." She went on to criticize Mayor Rudy Giuliani directly: "If he is leading the rush to judgment in New York, how can we trust him to exercise good judgment in Washington?"

Winning the Senate race in New York may not come from Clinton or Giuliani doing well but from one of them doing badly. By that measure, Giuliani's reaction to the latest police killing, the fourth of an unarmed black man in 13 months, gave Clinton her best campaign week yet. Giuliani typically springs to the cops' defense. But this time he wouldn't even express sympathy to the victim's mother, because it "might imply that the shooting was unjustified." He had no compunctions about implying that the shooting was justified. Dorismond was "no altar boy," Giuliani reported, as if all non-altar boys are subject to summary execution on the sidewalks of New York. The slain security guard had behaved in a way that was "very aggressive toward the police," he added, though there was no proof that Dorismond did anything except perhaps annoy the plainclothes narcotics cop by rebuffing his attempt to buy marijuana. Giuliani also asserted that Dorismond had spent a "good deal of his adult life punching people," a reference to a domestic complaint filed by Dorismond's girlfriend, which resulted in no charge against him. Though Giuliani released Dorismond's adult and juvenile records (the latter are supposed to remain sealed), they revealed that he had never been convicted of anything more serious than disorderly conduct. At the same time, Giuliani praised Anthony Vasquez, the officer who shot Dorismond, as a "very, very distinguished undercover officer," leaving out information suggesting that he was no altar boy himself; he once shot a neighbor's dog and pulled out his revolver during a personal altercation at a bar.

As his weeklong campaign against Dorismond aroused criticism rather than quieted it, Giuliani stopped holding his daily press briefings at city hall and refused to meet with the black community, saying the killing of Dorismond, a Haitian, had "nothing to do with race." By Thursday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson had chimed in, claiming that the New York City mayor is "not only mean; he is becoming mental...His reaction to the killing of unarmed people is irresponsible." Giuliani said he expected such carping from "the political pile-on team captained by Al Sharpton for Hillary Clinton."

But what he may not have expected was criticism from his own ranks. Long Island Republican Congressman Peter King, the son of a cop who will eventually endorse Giuliani, said, "Rudy is a great wartime mayor. But once he got rid of murderers and squeegee men, he kept going--jaywalkers, vendors; he couldn't stop himself. Obviously, the cop made a mistake here, but the mayor can't acknowledge it." Former Giuliani aide and Republican National Committee chairman Rich Bond worried out loud that Giuliani's strong defense in this particular case could turn what has been a huge positive for the mayor--his record on crime--into a negative.