Week In Politics: U.S.-Russia Ties, Slain NYPD Officers
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
For more, we turn now to our political commentators. Sitting in this week are New York Times columnist Gail Collins. Hi there, Gail.
GAIL COLLINS: Hey.
CORNISH: And Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor for the National Review and columnist for Bloomberg View. Welcome to the program.
RAMESH PONNURU: Thank you.
CORNISH: I want to touch briefly on the story we just heard from Corey. This past year, there were certain voices that seemed to say Vladimir Putin was kind of getting the better of the diplomatic community, criticizing President Obama's handling of the diplomatic crisis over Ukraine. Ramesh, I can start with you. Hearing the state of things now, does it still feel like that's the case?
PONNURU: You know, I think that Putin has really overplayed his hand and united the West against him. At the beginning of this crisis, he had a client-government - or a puppet government even - in charge of the entire territory of Ukraine. Now he's just got a little slice of it. His economy is in freefall, and this is all his own doing.
CORNISH: Gail?
COLLINS: You know, we think about the year and Putin, we think about the Ukraine, but I think over the long run, this is yet going to go down in history as another guy who came in promising that he was going to diversify his country's economy, get away from the total dependence on oil it's had for so long and didn't do it.
CORNISH: And I want to turn a little bit to domestic news as well. That's because the wake of murdered New York Police Department Officer Rafael Ramos was today. Officer Ramos, along with Officer Wenjian Liu, was murder last weekend by an assailant who had posted messages on social media, suggesting the assault was revenge for deaths of two unarmed black men at the hands of authority. I want to play a piece of tape that came on Fox News on Monday. This is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the aftermath.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOX NEWS BROADCAST)
RUDY GIULIANI: The mayor needs to apologize to the police for having defamed them. If you take the sum total of the mayor's comments and the president's comments, they have defamed the police. They have created the impression that there is - and I think the president even used these words, I think he did - a systemic problem. There isn't a systemic problem of racism.
CORNISH: Ramesh, I'm going to come to you again because prior to the shooting, there were comments, not just from Democrats but from Republicans, about how and whether to reconsider issues of policing and the judicial system. Do these events change that conversation headed into January?
PONNURU: Well, I think that there is still a lot of interest on both sides of the aisle in some sorts of criminal justice reform. The question of whether we have gone too far with mandatory minimums is really sort of independent of what's going on in - with these protests. But I think that it's very important for people to understand that there is a lot of law and order sentiment on the part of the public. And so if you're going to reform the criminal justice system, it has to be done with respect toward that point of view.
CORNISH: Gail, Mayor de Blasio's tried to walk a careful line, trying to bring the focus on the death of the fallen officers, trying to ask protesters to suspend demonstrations until the funerals have passed. Do you think that he has managed to walk this line?
COLLINS: He ran into a rough patch when he said that his son, Dante, who is of course - his wife is African-American and Dante was very famous during the political campaign for his - the ads that were made with him. He has this really spectacular afro. And then the mayor tried to use Dante again talking about how he had - you know, his son had to be careful. You know, every parent of a black kid, you know, tells their kid - their children, I think, you know, you have to be careful, these guys don't always know who you are and walk carefully. And that outraged the police who felt he was making something personal that hadn't been personal. And it's a very weird kind of thing that we're in where a guy who came into office sort of symbolizing some kind of racial amalgam suddenly by referring to his own family has created this sort of crisis - this critical - and it's not all helpful, may I say, to have Rudy Giuliani coming back and stirring the pot. It's probably the least thing we need to have done right now.
CORNISH: Ramesh, is this a voice people want to hear from again, Rudy Giuliani?
PONNURU: You know...
COLLINS: That's - yeah...
PONNURU: If Mayor de Blasio had good relations with the police, then Giuliani's comments would not cause a ripple. The problem is that he's got an underlying hostility with a lot of police officers.
CORNISH: Though the current commissioner argued that every New York mayor has a problem with their police department in one way or another.
PONNURU: Well, look, and the police unions have often been high confrontational. But sometimes it hurts a mayor and sometimes it doesn't. Right now it's hurting this mayor because it's touching something deeper.
CORNISH: I want to touch on one brief thing that's actually a little overhang from last week. And that's a little back-and-forth between Rand Paul and Marco Rubio over - had some disagreement over the diplomatic thaw between the U.S. and Cuba. And Ramesh, you saw something a little more in this.
PONNURU: Well, I think it's really remarkable the extent to which Senator Paul, who supports President Obama's policy on Cuba, has really gone after Senator Rubio for disagreeing with it and disagreeing with him on Twitter with a series of essentially so's-your-old-man kind of tweets. And in previous cycles, I think a lot of people who are thinking about the presidency, as both Senator Paul and to a lesser extent Senator Rubio clearly are, would have avoided that kind of tone and thought that it was unpresidential. And I think Senator Paul is gambling that maybe our standards for what constitutes presidential have changed.
CORNISH: Gail, last minute to you with Twitter fights (laughter).
COLLINS: This is one thing - I don't know why politicians - we'll see now whether this ever works out for politicians. I think there is nothing more dangerous than a high-profile politician armed with a Twitter. I mean, it's very, very, very dangerous and bad, although I think Rand Paul is right about Cuba.
CORNISH: Although fun for the rest of us. And I think...
COLLINS: We really like it a lot.
CORNISH: Yeah. We'll have another two years of Twitter battles to look forward to. Gail Collins, columnist for the New York Times, thanks so much for joining us.
COLLINS: My pleasure.
CORNISH: And Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor for the National Review and columnist for Bloomberg View. See you on Twitter?
PONNURU: Absolutely.
CORNISH: All right. Thanks guys.
Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.