Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani says New Yorkers are begging him to run for mayor again after nearly 18 months of Democrat Bill de Blasio's leadership.
"A lot of people come up to me and tell me to run again. I’m not running again. Don’t want to run again," Giuliani, a Republican, said Sunday on
"The Cats Roundtable" on AM 970 in New York.
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"They’ll come up to me and say 'You've got to run again for mayor … You've got to find somebody … Save us,'" Giuliani told host John Catsimatidis. "Some guy yelled at me coming off a plane the other day, 'It's your duty to find somebody that can replace this guy.'"
Giuliani said he likes de Blasio personally, but his policies are "very destructive."
Giuliani took office in 1994, after years of Democratic leadership, and quickly began working to improve the city's image by dropping the crime rate. He ran troublesome squeegie men — panhandlers who demand payment for cleaning vehicle windshields without being asked — off the streets and implemented the city's controversial stop-and-frisk policy.
His successor, Michael Bloomberg, continued Giuliani's "broken window" policing policies. Ending stop-and-frisk was one of the first policies implemented by de Blasio, a progressive Democrat who joined other critics in calling the practice racist for unfairly targeting black men.
Critics now complain that New York City, where crime has risen 13 percent in the last 12 months, is reverting to its dark days under Giuliani's Democrat predecessor David Dinkins.
On Sunday's "Cats Roundtable," Giuliani also blasted President Barack Obama's
nuclear deal with Iran.
He called Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei "a homicidal maniac who’s intent on the destruction of Israel and who’s intent on the destruction of the United States of America."
Obama, he said, "drinks the Kool-Aid" if he believes Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is a reformer.
"I get some degree of intelligence on this," Giuliani said. "There have been … more executions in Iran than under (former President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad. So, Rouhani, who poses to the world as a reformer, Rouhani was also part of the council that ordered the killing of Jewish people in Argentina. People should know that."
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