Rudy Giuliani has finally gone up on the air in New Hampshire. Rather than playing the role of Captain 9/11, in this ad, Rudy is the guy that cleaned up New York. Contrasting grainy black and white images of a crime-infested city before he arrived with warm color imagery of tourists and happy residents after he took office, the ad shows the miraculous (and vastly exaggerated) turnaround that he supposedly engineered:
But there's one other element of the footage that you might not notice on first glance...
The first thing that tipped me off was the quick shot that flashed by during the crime-infested city montage, of a billboard reading "Harem." Now, maybe some New Yorkers will recognize that theater, but as a non-New Yorker, when that flashed by I read it as "Harlem." I would hazard a guess that most other viewers would read it similarly. Well, maybe that was just an accident, you might think. But look again at the before and after footage.
Rudy introduces the pre-turnaround montage by saying “they used to call it unmanageable, ungovernable”, and we cut to the opening shot of the montage with a grainy black and white street scene featuring... lots of black people. He continues “a large majority of New Yorkers wanted to leave and live somewhere else.” How is that statement illustrated? With a shot of a white man turning towards the camera, in front of the “Harem” sign.
Rudy continues: “It was a city that was in financial crisis, a city that was the crime capital of America, a city that was the welfare capital of America…” The music shifts to happy themes and warm, sunny color images, as he says “By the time I left office, New York City was being proclaimed as the best example of conservative government in the country. We turned it into the safest large city in America, the welfare to work capital of America, and most importantly the spirit of the people of the city had changed…”
How is this miraculous urban turnaround illustrated? With a shot of a white tourist couple taking a photo, white kids raising a flag, a white couple looking off of a balcony with hope in their eyes. There actually is a quick shot of an African-American couple climbing some stairs, but unlike any of the other two-shots, their faces are obscured, and they’re much less recognizable, as they’re far from the camera, and small in the frame.
So is this all a series of coincidences? Or is Giuliani, a man faced with endless criticism of his racially divisive tactics as Mayor of New York, making a clear appeal to the overwhelmingly white voters of New Hampshire?