CNN's Jeff Greenfield was an aide to John Lindsay, whose efforts to use the New York mayoralty as a springboard to the White House were a flop. Today Greenfield shares some interesting thoughts with The New York Times on why Rudy Giuliani has at least a chance of defying history, which dictates that New York mayors sink into political oblivion after the conclusion of their mayoralties:

“The problem,” said Jeff Greenfield, a former Lindsay speechwriter and now senior analyst for CNN, “is when you think of a mayor you think of someone who picks up the garbage and fills potholes, and the leap from mayor to president is a bridge too far.

“What’s different with Rudy? The obvious answer is 9/11,” Mr. Greenfield said. “It has transformed him into a kind of general in the global war on terror. And 9/11 transformed New York into a sympathetic place. If you buy his story, Rudy applied conservative values and transformed New York. If voters want a leader to transform all the things they don’t like, Rudy can use New York and say, ‘I did this.’ ”

A couple quick points about this. First, Rudy will be perceived as a "general" in the global war on terror only to the extent that the media lets him get away with portraying the fact that he was there on 9/11 as foreign policy experience, which it isn't.

Second, there's a reason why Rudy's association with New York and urbanism may not damage him: His mayoralty was an anti-New York one, in the sense that he was driven by his very visible disgust urban disorder. He's the guy who hated everything about New York that the rest of the country did, and acted on that hatred. I'm not saying this