NY'ers [Love] Rudy, but There's a Limit

By David S. Broder

Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page B07

When New York City residents voted last Tuesday in the mayoral primary, they had a choice of five Democrats and two Republicans. But the man the polls said most of them wanted to vote for -- incumbent Mayor Rudolph Giuliani -- was nowhere on the ballot.

The reason: Term limits that New Yorkers had approved in 1993 for the mayor and City Council made Giuliani ineligible for a third term. You could call it Ron Lauder's revenge.

Lauder, an heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, had spent a record $14 million in 1989 on a campaign for the Republican nomination for mayor. He lost in a near-landslide to the same Rudy Giuliani, but remained on the general election ballot as the Conservative Party nominee while Giuliani was defeated by Democrat David Dinkins.

Four years later, in the same election in which Giuliani reversed the 1989 result and became mayor, Lauder was the chief sponsor and almost the sole financier of the term-limits initiative campaign. He spent about $1 million -- 20 times what the opponents had available -- and saw his handiwork prevail by a 3 to 2 margin.

Peter Vallone, the Democratic City Council speaker (and an unsuccessful mayoral candidate on Tuesday), commented at the time that "there was really no public debate. Ron Lauder just capitalized on voter discontent."

It was not hard to find such discontent in New York or most other parts of the country in the early 1990s. American voters soured on politicians of both parties, turning against President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and against the long-dominant congressional Democrats in 1994. Between 1990 and 1995, 18 states passed term limits on their legislators, 16 states term-limited their governors and hundreds of cities did the same thing to their mayors and councils.

Lauder was climbing on a bandwagon that was already rolling, fueled by a combination of populist discontent and financing from wealthy individuals and interests.

But to understand why term limits became a favorite tool of conservative activists, you must go back even further in history -- to the Republican frustration with Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the GOP won control of Congress in 1946, 18 months after the death of the only man elected four times as president, one of its first actions was to introduce term limits into the federal government. The 22nd Amendment, the two-term limit, was rushed through Congress in the winter of 1947 and four years later was ratified by 41 states to become part of the Constitution.

Just in time, it turned out, to make Dwight D. Eisenhower the first president subject to that limitation on his tenure. The second chief executive to be term-limited was another Republican icon, Ronald Reagan. And now, in New York, Rudy Giuliani, the hero to conservatives all across the country last year when he was expected to campaign for the Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, has also been caught in the term-limits snare.

Giuliani withdrew from that Senate race to undergo treatment for prostate cancer, but his outstanding leadership in the wake of the terrorist attacks gave the lie to any fears that he had lost his energy or drive. At 57, he clearly has both the capacity and the ambition for further service to his city. Some of his closest associates have lobbied the state legislature to overturn the city's term-limits law, and Giuliani himself -- without recanting his past support of those limits -- has indicated that he would like to stay on as mayor for at least three months, if not for four more years.

It long has puzzled me why conservatives, particularly of the libertarian stripe, with their strong attachment to freedom and their ingrained distrust of restrictions on individuals, have espoused a measure that frustrates the right of voters to elect officials they want to elect.

But the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, last month published a study of California term limits that said they had "substantially attained their goal . . . to end careerism among state legislators." That is an odd conclusion, since the main target of the California movement, longtime Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, has moved blithely onward to be elected twice as mayor of San Francisco. When his current term ends, speculation is that he will run for the state Senate.

Back in New York, Lauder declined to answer my questions but e-mailed me a statement saying "the law should be flexible enough to extend the mayor's term through next year, pushing the mayoral election to November 2002. An extended term would honor the 1 million New Yorkers who voted for term limits and keep Rudy on the job as we start rebuilding."

That neat straddle leaves only one question unanswered: Why not trust the people to choose the mayor they want for as long as they want him?