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Is it time for Rudy Giuliani to leave the stage? Toby Harnden 'America's Mayor' lifted a nation after 9/11 - but this presidential candidate can often seem more Mafia don than statesman, says Toby Harnden The last time Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III was due to face Hillary Clinton in an election, his campaign ended prematurely amid a month-long public soap opera that included the declaration that "I don't really care about politics right now". It was the year before the September 11 attacks, and Rudy - as everyone but his mother calls him - was famous for having cleaned up the Big Apple, clamping down on squeegee merchants, jaywalkers, porn shops and petty criminals. He'd thrown Yasser Arafat out of a concert hall and declared war on the Brooklyn Museum of Arts for exhibiting a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung.
(Article continues below) There was never much doubt about what Manhattan's liberal intelligentsia thought of him. Yesterday, The New York Times endorsed his Republican rival, John McCain, for the presidency, branding its former mayor "a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power". But Mayor Giuliani brought crime down by 56 per cent, slashed the numbers receiving welfare by almost 60 per cent and cut taxes 23 times. The conservative columnist George Will has hailed him as "a man for whom pugnacity is a political philosophy". That month in 2000, when he dropped out of the race for the Senate against Clinton, was a tabloid dream. His marriage unravelled (his then second wife learned their marriage was over when Giuliani announced it in a press conference), and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His wife forced him out of his official mansion and he moved into an apartment with a gay couple - who would advise him in the mornings about what tie to wear - and a chihuahua called Bonnie.
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