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"It's happened again"
When gun-control advocates use mass shootings to push for a handgun ban, critics accuse them of exploiting tragedy. But there's a difference between exploiting a tragedy and learning from it.
By Dan Savage
[11/04/99]

Escape Hatch?
Could the Utah senator's quixotic run for president cost him his Senate seat?
By Jake Tapper
[11/04/99]

Warren Beatty spurns media suitors
The actor says a campaign in 2000 would be "nutty," but won't rule out a future run.
By Anthony York
[11/04/99]

San Francisco's "Blair Witch" mayor's race
Gay supervisor Tom Ammiano's insurgent write-in campaign will likely force incumbent Willie Brown into a runoff.
By Anthony York
[11/04/99]

The Silicon Dominion skews right
Virginia's booming high-tech industry helps the GOP wrest control of the state government away from the Democrats for the first time in history.
By Alicia Montgomery
[11/03/99]

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"I made a mistake," said the man who is not known for such admissions, "and I accept responsibility. The people who ran the campaign on the other side ... did a very good job, and they're entitled to feel elated by their victory."

No, he did not concede defeat in that election, the one where he is going up against Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. That election is a year away.

But Giuliani managed, by pushing a package of revisions of New York's charter -- the city's constitution -- to make the election of 1999 a referendum on his legacy. The result: 74 percent of voters rejected his charter revision proposal, 26 percent supported it.

And it just so happened that the very coalition that will be supporting Clinton next year -- the state's labor unions and its leading Democratic elected officials -- had an awful lot to do with that defeat. The first lady herself didn't lift a finger, didn't speak about charter change, didn't deploy any staff or volunteer time on the measure. But many scored this early electoral skirmish Hillary 1, Rudy 0.

It all started in the spring, when Giuliani appointed a commission with the express mandate of changing the rules of mayoral succession. In New York, the public advocate -- which is to government what the appendix is to the body: a useless organ that tends to go unnoticed except when it causes pain -- takes over if the mayor leaves office before his elected term is over. But the current holder of the public advocate's office, Mark Green, a former Nader-raider, tends to goad the mayor frequently on issues like police brutality and consumer protection.

Green represents all that the mayor has derided as the left-wing, defeatist ideology that ran the city in the bad old days -- which was apparently the city's entire history before Giuliani was elected mayor.

The initial idea of the commission, chaired by Giuliani's former deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, was to change the charter to require a special election if Giuliani left office early, that is, say, if he were elected senator in 2000.

But even though most good-government groups, including Common Cause, the Bar Association, and the League of Women Voters (known in this city as the goo-goos) usually think elections are a good idea, they cried foul at the attempt by the mayor to tinker with the charter for his own personal revenge.

By the end of the summer, the commission, which met briefly in generally inaccessible locations around the city, had backed off some. It proposed requiring a special election if a mayor left office before finishing his or her term, but to take effect in 2002, so it wouldn't involve the Giuliani senate race. The commission came up with another 13 proposals that did everything from the benign -- require trigger locks on guns -- to the controversial -- require the city to sock away budget surpluses for a rainy day (instead of, say, spending them on raises for city workers).

The goo-goos were still in a tizzy.

The mayor saw a chance to use charter reform to promote what he calls the positive changes he's made in the city -- lowering crime, improving the quality of life, responsible fiscal management. And in the process, he helped make the charter-reform election a mandate on his time in office.

Next page | Charter reform: About our children's future?