Rudy's Deputies Redeputized

As Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson visit the city today, Rudy Giuliani's former deputy mayors will kick off what the campaign calls "Rudy Gets Results," a tour that's designed to highlight Giuliani's record of economic growth, fighting crime and cleaning up the city.

The redeputized mayors are: Rudy washington, Joe Lhota and Randy Mastro. They'll be joined by other members of the Giuliani mayoral administration for a Times Square event. And then they'll begin to travel as surrogates on the mayor's behalf.

There is some chutzpah: the Giuliani campaign is betting that Republican voters elsewhere will be receptive to New Yawkers tawking about New Yawk; some of Giuliani's rivals believe that the very mention of the city reminds voters of Giuliani's cosmopolitanism. The other danger is that Giuliani’s rivals use the “Rudy Gets Results” tour to try and bring up some of the less auspicious aspects of Giuliani’s mayoral tenure, but that will probably be hard: for better or worse, what everyone knows about Giuliani and New York, aside from 9/11, is that he cut crime (even if the decline began under David Dinkins and can be attributed in part to police commissioners and/or social trends) and made the city seem safer.

How many Iowa Republicans and South Carolina Republicans have visited New York? Probably more than we think.

One deputy mayor who won't be participating is former Giuliani adviser Fran Reiter. She's now become a critic.