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The August issue of Harper’s featured a lovely, partisan attack on Giuliani as its lead story, portraying him as the essence of all that’s wrong with the Republican party today: authoritarianism, corruption, and a violent refusal to acknowledge failures, sold to the public with the ever-popular packaging of fear and hate. The article rakes Giuliani over the coals for his handling of 9/11; after delivering his reassuring speech, he proceeded to handle the actual clean-up by sacrificing worker safety in order to do it all on the cheap, and especially for quick photo ops before passing the real work onto Bloomberg. The article skewers Giuliani for his quick dash to the lecture circuit, trumpeting the happy accident of being mayor when the attack struck without actually doing any mayoring, and for even ducking out of anti-terrorism panels—for which he received a salary, but whose meetings he did not attend—when public service began to interfere with cashing in on the misfortunes of others. The article also reminds us of Giuliani’s style of government, confrontational, secretive, and divisive, including many examples to show how a Giuliani presidency would be an expansion of what we’re getting now from Bush. As Giuliani himself once said, in finest Orwellian fashion: “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. You have free speech so I can be heard.”

The article does not, however, raise what to me is the perfect emblem of Giuliani’s performance as mayor. In 1998, demonstrators marched on city hall as part of the AIDS vigil. Unlike his successor, Giuliani does not believe in meeting with the public. Nor was he satisfied with simply ignoring them. The demonstrators were herded into a small area fenced off by concrete barricades, well out of reach of anyone else approaching city hall that day. The demonstrators were then filmed, singly and up close, by cameras ostensibly intended to record police behavior, but later used to identify and harass the demonstrators. Giuliani had snipers posted, just in case a crowd mourning for AIDS victims had to be mowed down from the roof of city hall.

Snipers.

Giuliani also used tanks to evict squatters from Harlem, but at least the squatters were breaking the law. The marchers’ only offence was to make Giuliani look bad—or rather, remind us that Giuliani had made himself look bad. The message was clear: anyone criticizing government, and especially the person in government, could expect to be harassed by every means necessary, including death threats.

Any presidential campaign that can’t make political hay out of that doesn’t deserve to win. I envision a television ad that depicts a generic feel-good sort of political rally with far fewer picket signs than you would see at a real rally. The camera settles on a smiling young speaker calling for more action, and telescopes back as the speaker continues, eventually reaching a view through telescopic crosshairs as the speaker reaches complaints about an uncaring government. Switch to a side view of a sniper in official-looking Kevlar vest and helmet, chewing as he peers calmly through the scope. Snap to black. Fade in the statement: “In 1998, Rudy Giuliani employed rooftop snipers to silence a peaceful public demonstration.” The impact should match that of the “daisy” ad that torpedoed Goldwater in 1964.

I’m an amateur; presumably professionals could do better. But really, the ad almost writes itself. It’s vicious, negative, and reduces political campaigning on both sides to a question of who you fear most: terrorists, or your own proto-fascist leaders? But if, god help us, Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, it will be way past time to play nice. Certainly he won’t, and neither will his party.