The barrage of sensational news and commentary about the personal life of the mayor is damaging to the interests of working people. It seeks to draw workers and middle-class layers into becoming riveted on gossip and exposures about the morals of the "elite," and to drag them into the morass of the politics of resentment against rich and prominent figures. It is a distraction from the pressing struggles unfolding in the city and around the world and undercuts the ability of working people to take the moral high ground in confronting the offensive by the bosses and their government.

The way the news media tells it, Giuliani’s decision to separate from his wife; the mayor’s personal relationship with another woman, Judith Nathan; and the multitude of disputes involved in a pending divorce proceeding is the most important issue facing this city’s more than 8 million people.

"Meltdown Time for the Mayor: Giuliani ‘distracted’ amid personal woes," "Rudy’s No. 1 Gal Pal ‘Very good friend’ forever, he hopes," "Mayor’s Pals Reveal His Secret Anguish--Drug causes impotence," and "Rudy Takes Aim at Donna’s Perks--May try to cut her staff, office, travel funds," are among the major headlines in the city’s daily papers day after day. The nationwide weekly People magazine placed this topic on the cover of the May 26 issue under the title, "The Mayor, The Wife, The Mistress."

Much of the press coverage has been around Donna Hanover’s suit in divorce court seeking to block the mayor from bringing his friend Judith Nathan into Gracie Mansion, the luxurious residence of the city’s mayor. Currently the mayor, his two children, and Hanover reside there. Shortly after a judge lifted a gag order on the case, which Giuliani wanted reimposed, the mayor’s lawyer, Raoul Felder, unleashed a barrage of anti-woman slanders against Hanover, which the press repeated. He called Hanover an "uncaring mother" who schemed to advance her acting career while "howling like a stuck pig." He also stated, "She reminds me of the little kid who murders his parents and complains he’s an orphan."

The dispute remained a major news story when the judge ruled May 21 that Nathan could not enter Gracie Mansion, and Giuliani moved to cut the perks associated with Hanover’s role as "First Lady" that includes a $300,000 annual budget. Giuliani’s first step was to strip Hanover of her title as Gracie Mansion hostess.

A year ago last May, Giuliani announced he was abandoning his campaign for the U.S. Senate, amidst a similar barrage of soap-opera type articles in the media exposing and scandalizing the mayor’s personal life. Prior to that public frenzy, politics in New York had been marked by increasing mobilizations against police brutality.

When Patrick Dorismond, a 26-year-old Black man was killed by cops on the streets of Manhattan last March, Giuliani launched a campaign of slander against the young man in an effort to justify the cops’ action. But huge demonstrations exposed Giuliani’s lies, making the mayor’s stance a liability for the ruling class.

But the way that Giuliani has been brought down--by scandalizing and publicizing the most intimate details of his personal life--is a setback to working people.

During his two terms in office, Giuliani, a liberal Republican politician, has been at the cutting edge of the drive by the ruling rich to attack the rights and living standards of working people. However, as he has attempted to press forward along this front he’s come up against growing working-class resistance in the city.

For example, thousands of public school teachers rallied at City Hall last month against demands for longer working days, individual "merit pay," and moves to undercut seniority. In March, 3,000 transit workers rallied to defend health benefits the bosses are seeking to weaken.

The mayor backed the campaign by Edison Schools Inc. to privatize five of the city’s worst performing schools and run them on a for-profit basis. Despite a $500,000 grant by the Board of Education to Edison to promote this scheme, working people with children at these five schools saw this for what it was--an attack on public education--and overwhelmingly voted the proposal down. The mayor has also backed efforts to overturn the city’s bilingual education program, a drive that also ran into opposition from working people.

In an attack on free speech, the mayor called for censoring some controversial works of art on display at the Brooklyn Museum, threatening to cut public funds for institutions that exhibit such displays, though so far without much success. He created a self-proclaimed "decency panel" charged with keeping such works of art out of museums that receive public money.

The Giuliani administration has given the nod to more aggressive policing tactics, including the deployment of large contingents of cops at many demonstrations in the city. Over the past months the police department has started jailing anyone arrested at a demonstration of more than 20 people instead of simply issuing summons for misdemeanor charges.

Meanwhile homelessness in the city has risen to levels unequaled since the 1980s. Every night more than 25,000 people, despite more stringent screening procedures initiated by the Giuliani administration, stay in public shelters that are increasingly overcrowded and unsanitary. And infant mortality is soaring in some of the poorer working-class areas like central Harlem, where 1999 figures put it at 15.5 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births, up 35 percent from the previous year.

It’s in confronting these political issues that a fighting working-class movement can be built.  
 
Diversion for working people
The increasing coarseness of political discourse among capitalist politicians and within the media, accompanied by the pornographication of politics involving gossip and prying into the personal lives of public figures, offers no road forward for working people. Such methods are the stock-in-trade for rightist and fascist forces, who seek to build their movement by railing against the corruption and degradation of the "ruling elite," while promoting policies--from scapegoating immigrants to Jew hatred--that weaken and divide the working class.

It’s a trap for working people who have been victimized by the policies carried out by the Giuliani administration to get diverted into thinking that with these salacious attacks against the mayor he is "just getting what he deserves." Such an approach targets hard-won rights previously won by working people, like the right to privacy. It corrodes human solidarity and the dignity the working class brings to human relations.

The fight by the working class for the moral high ground and against the coarsening of political discourse is a fight for the right to practice politics free from harassment by the government, the bosses, and rightist thugs.

The problem with the capitalists and their political representatives is not that they are immoral, hypocritical people as individuals. The scandalmongering is an effort--organized from within capitalist politics, largely by its ultraright wing--to make gains from middle-class panic and draft workers along with the declining ruling class itself down into the pit of resentment and salacious envy.  
 
 
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