BY ZOEY OROL

The last mayor of a large city to have been elected President was Grover Cleveland of Buffalo, New York, who won in 1884. Calvin Coolidge was the last mayor of any city – he ran Northampton, Massachusetts – to be elected president. That happened in 1924. Currently, the candidacy of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is again forcing the electorate to gauge the relevance of mayoral experience to the presidency. At first glance, the two positions have much in common, with shared responsibilities that include managing large bureaucracies, navigating complex budgets, overseeing law enforcement, and balancing the needs of various constituencies. Despite the appearance of overlap, however, actual similarities between mayoral and presidential responsibilities are severely limited. Mayors’ lack of foreign policy responsibilities, in particular, explains the paucity of mayors-turned-presidents.

Hardly Analogous
The offices of mayor and president can differ in almost every substantive respect, most apparently in logistics. As Gary Ater, a writer for The American Chronicle and political blogger, asked, how could managing the New York City police force “compare to being commander-in-chief of a world military operation with a Navy, Air Force, Army, Marines [and] nuclear capability?” The sheer complexity of America’s military forces makes them essentially incomparable to the law enforcement operations of any city. The size of the economy also differentiates municipalities from the country at large; as Ater pointed out, a large city’s GDP cannot compare to that of the world’s largest economy.

The particular duties of mayor further separate it from the presidency. According to Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, “There’s not really any theory of national security [or] foreign policy” that a mayor must craft and implement. Similarly, the size of a city’s population means that being mayor is “very much a day-to-day proposition in governing,” which often denies a mayor the “opportunity to think in a broader context,” or so says Michael H. Ebner, an emeritus professor of history at Lake Forest College. With foreign relations and a much larger constituency as key responsibilities of the presidency, a mayor’s experience bears only a narrow resemblance.

America's Mayor
Understanding these key differences provides insight into Giuliani’s campaign strategy. Giuliani has attempted to overcome his lack of foreign policy experience by emphasizing his role as mayor after the September 2001 attacks on New York City, and uses his response to that disaster as a paradigm for how he would behave in international crisis situations. Argues Mann, “It isn’t because of his duties or his work as mayor” that he is a viable candidate today – rather, “It was the serendipity of him being in office on 9/11 [and] creating a national impression that he could then ride.” This impression may or may not be accurate, but as Ebner says, “It doesn’t matter whether it is tangible or ephemeral because in people’s minds he was the man in the certain place at a certain time.” Giuliani’s image as America’s Mayor is still alive and well in the American consciousness.

Paradoxically, Giuliani has also used September 11th to separate himself in his candidacy from other mayors, a potentially savvy move given how rarely mayors ascend to the Presidency. His presence at a time of crisis forges a link to those “generals who became President, like Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower; they are marked as heroic figures and that is really the coin of the realm for Giuliani,” Ebner told the HPR.

But the visibility he has sought to manipulate may ultimately detract from his electability. During his second term in particular, observed Mann, Giuliani “proved to be extremely polarizing.” The double-edged sword of national visibility means that while Giuliani may be able to embellish his record, he cannot erase its darker spots.

Questioning Qualifications
Using Giuliani’s candidacy to understand why so few mayors have been elected President raises the question of how relevant past political experience can ever be. Finding one position that tests all of the skills required for the presidency is an impossible task. Perhaps, then, Americans might be better off not looking to previous political experience as an indicator of how prepared a candidate’s presidential toolbox is. Rather, they could use it as a harbinger of the executive leadership style that a candidate would adopt in the White House and compare contenders using that criterion.