The limit on term limits

Rudy Guiliani is a man who thrives in crises. In quiet times, he seems despotic, pulling museum funding, cracking down on minorities, threatening city organizations who have the audacity to defy his rule. But in bad times, he plays the hero with gusto. Give him a cancer scare, a crime wave, a terrorist attack, and he rises to the occasion, providing tenderness and toughness in New York-sized doses. Perhaps this explains why Guiliani has had trouble with the balancing act of late, the combination of terror and attempts at normalcy. The man who loves a disaster wants to cling to his title, ignoring the term limits that would tear him from the office he was born to fill. The man who fails at normalcy cannot accept that stretching the rules undermines our attempts to get back to life as usual. The people he leads are rightly confused by the contradiction inherent in their respect for the law and their desire to be led by the one man they feel can restore their city and their confidence.

The law dictates that Guiliani cannot serve a third consecutive term. Proponents of term limits, as Guiliani once was, suggest that these laws are designed for the people. Often opposed by politicians already in power, they are meant to bring new blood and new ideas to public offices and to keep the entrenched political elite from taking absolute control. Term limits are, inherently, a populist idea. Or at least that is what their advocates tell Americans.

The reality is that we have term limits in every state and county. They are called elections. When we go into a voting booth we are choosing who has the best ideas, new or old, and who deserves the power we bestow upon them. Term limit laws make those choices for us, protecting the people from their own decisions. It is easy to make such laws sound good by criticizing those with power. It is easy to hold up men like Strom Thurmond, who seem the poster children for term limits, and say we need to undermine the whole idea of democratic elections. But the people of South Carolina elected Senator Thurmond nine times, and no one should be able to tell them they were wrong, that he was really only the best choice on the first two ballots. This is a democracy; people make their own choices about representation, and no matter how distasteful or stupid one may think those choices are, they are valid because they are of the people.

As New York struggles to even imagine the recovery effort to come, the rhetoric of term limits is unearthed as being shallow and wrong. New Yorkers trust Rudy Guiliani. They know his faults and his quirks, but they believe him when he speaks. He was with them through what was arguably the worst day in the city's history, providing leadership in every sense of the word. Mark Green and Mike Bloomberg, the Democrat and Republican candidates for mayor, are not unqualified or unpopular. They just aren't Rudy Guiliani. But the law says that Mr. Guiliani is done with being mayor, and so New Yorkers must accept their two choices on the ballot and try not to long too wistfully for the days when Rudy would have strode with authority to the podium and told New Yorkers, day after day, that everything would be okay.

Of course, Mr. Guiliani, the man who seems out of place in times of regular business, has taken his newfound opposition to term limits one step too far. He suggested he might seek a third term and is now demanding to serve an extra three months. But the answer is not to bend the law to allow Mr. Guiliani to stay in office. The answer is to recognize that term limits do not fix our political problems; they simply remove the people's right to decide. Much as Mr. Guiliani may want to stay in Gracie Mansion, the problems presented by this situation are not just about him; they are about an unfair law that has been tested and has come up short.

In a recent appearance on the Howard Stern show, Mr. Guiliani admitted he liked the idea of term limits until they started to affect him. That's the problem with term limits: They sound fair and right and democratic until it is your right to vote, to decide, that is being eroded. Too many New Yorkers died on Sept. 11, implicitly defending the rights and freedoms of democracy. It is unfortunate that those who survived must now give up their right to choose their own leader. We can only hope that Americans will take away this lesson about term limits, a lesson New Yorkers had to learn the hard way. Katherine Reilly is from Short Hills, N.J. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.