Hard-nosed New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, caught up with First Lady Hillary Clinton in a take-no-prisoners race for one of the Empire State's U.S. Senate seats, may be showing his softer side. In a move that pundits are saying is designed to demonstrate his hitherto virtually unknown ability to compromise, the mayor on Monday struck a deal to end his dispute with the Brooklyn Museum, from which he had withdrawn funding last year over its exhibition of an elephant-dung-smeared "Virgin Mary" portrait and other controversial art. In the agreement, the city will continue to fund the museum at its current level and the museum will drop a First Amendment suit it had filed against the city.
The settlement comes hard on the heels of the Patrick Dorismond case, in which Giuliani irked even some of his most strident supporters by bad-mouthing an unarmed black man who was shot to death by police in a botched buy-and-bust operation. Observers on both sides of the aisle complained that the mayor's handling of the Dorismond incident showed insensitivity and proved that he's incapable of reaching out to those who aren't his traditional supporters. Following the mayor's salvos against Dorismond, which included releasing the dead man's sealed juvenile criminal record, Clinton took the lead in the polls for the first time.
The polls appear to reflect a growing concern among voters: whether either candidate is capable of working with others, a trait seen as essential to being effective on Capitol Hill. Since his Senate run was first mooted, Democrats have painted Giuliani as a dictatorial mayor who may be able to keep crime rates low and the trains running on time, but who would be a disaster in any position that required teamwork. Meanwhile, in recent weeks the GOP has tried to paint the First Lady in a similar light. They point to the new book "The Case Against Hillary Clinton," in which former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan makes the case that it was the First Lady's inability to do business with other Democrats that doomed her attempts at health care reform. Look for both sides to increase attempts to make their candidate warmer and fuzzier — and for more polls to find out whether any of this image-making will have an effect.