Food chain?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Food chain?

New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a ’70s Democrat who turned Republican in the ’80s, made another turn in the ’90s to support the last true-believer Democrat, Gov. Mario Cuomo, who is losing. The ostensible reason is that a liberal governor with a taxing habit will be more generous with state funds to the city.

The real reason is that Rudy has come to despise his original Republican sponsor, Sen. Al D’Amato. Al denied Rudy the privilege of designating his successor as U.S. attorney, and Rudy retaliated recently by loosing his investigative hounds on a key D’Amato ally. The rift is intensely personal and irreparable.

When Al’s choice for governor, state Sen. George Pataki, spurted ahead in the polls, Rudy faced a bleak prospect. If his fellow Republican won, the path to the governorship would be blocked for nearly a decade, and the unforgetting Mr. D’Amato would be the state's power broker at the ’96 national convention. Thus, a Republican victory would dim the Giuliani star.

That’s how the eminence grise of New York politics, David Garth -- having delivered Democrat Ed Koch's endorsement to Rudy in his mayoral campaign -- was able to deliver Republican Rudy’s endorsement to Mr. Cuomo at the right moment.

When Rudy jumped ship, he praised Mr. Cuomo as “his own man,” thereby joining the attack on the Republican candidate as merely the cat’s-paw of Mr. D’Amato.

Rudy’s strategy: If Mario Cuomo’s record is the issue, Democrats lose; but if Al D’Amato’s personality can be made the issue, Mario Cuomo (helped upstate by a Ross Perot clone siphoning off protest votes) might slip back in to keep the Albany seat warm for Rudy in a few years. If Republican loyalists’ memories are too long for that, Rudy could follow the Mayor John Lindsay trail and run as a Democrat.