Last week, Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota defended his old boss, Rudy Giuliani, when the moderator of a GOP candidate debate said that the former mayor acted like “a jerk” for much of 2001. On Saturday, Giuliani repaid him with a fund-raising letter urging Republicans to donate to Lhota’s campaign, lest one of his Democratic opponents allow the city to “slip back to its unmanageable, ungovernable ways.” Giuliani assured recipients that Lhota “would stand up to the destructive policies of tax-and-spend politicians who put New York and America in peril” and credited him with helping to “make New York great again” when he served as his deputy mayor in the nineties. As New York’s Chris Smith has noted, Lhota will eventually need to move out of Giuliani’s shadow but, for now, it seems that that’s where at least some of the money is.
