What is it about being in the middle of a second term as New York City mayor that creates the impulse to speak negatively of someone whose death is causing you political annoyance?
In March 2000, amid his campaign against Hillary Clinton for Senate, an undercover officer shot to death unarmed private security guard Patrick Dorismond during a botched police drug sting. Giuliani managed to fan political and racial flames by releasing Dorismond's sealed juvenile arrest record, in a bid to establish in defense of police that Dorismond was no "altar boy." Actually, he had been -- and went to the same Brooklyn Catholic school as Giuliani. Some time later, after repeatedly defending his actions, Giuliani said something about regretting that he had not seen the "human" side of the situation.
Which brings us to this week, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg said controversially of the late James Zadroga, a police detective who worked for hundreds of hours on the smoldering pile at Ground Zero: "We wanted to have a hero, and there are plenty of heroes... It's just in this case, science says this was not a hero." The medical examiner had found that Zadroga's death was not directly related to WTC dust....
Dan Janison
Unlike his predecessor, however, Bloomberg in certain situations will spin around and change course quickly without seeming to worry too much about the contradiction. On Tuesday, Bloomberg said at a news conference: "This was a great NYPD officer who dedicated himself - put his life in harm's way hundreds of times during his career - and you can use your own definition...I certainly did not mean to hurt the family or impugn his reputation."
Maybe the variation in style between Giuliani and Bloomberg boils down to the difference between a lawyer obsessed with justifying his own statements and accusations and a businessman who knows when to cut bait on a bad investment. Bloomberg was quicker to reverse course this time than he was back in the first term, when he told firefighters in earshot of the news media that a diet doctor died from being fat -- even though the M.E. cited an accident on the sidewallk.