Former New York City mayor and professor of 9/11 studies Rudy Guiliani will not run for Governor of New York against either David Paterson or Andrew Cuomo, according to The New York Times. But fear not! Rudy will not leave New Yorkers to the sanity of Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.

The AP reports that Guiliani is “seriously considering” challenging Democratic incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand. Gillibrand was appointed to the seat only last year, so Guiliani’s OCD (btw, 9/11) might not be as heavy a burden as it would be against Schumer.

“Winning a U.S. Senate seat in a heavily Democratic New York would be a huge national story and rekindle any hope he may have,” Marist pollster Lee Miringhoff told the AP. “Rekindling” would be necessary judging from Guiliani’s disastrous run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008. If Guiliani has learned the lessons of 2008–for example, don’t rely entirely on having been the mayor of a certain city, on a certain day–then he could be a powerful challenger to Gillibrand. This, after all, is the man who managed to get himself elected in one of the most liberal cities in the country. Here’s looking at you Staten Island.

Ah, good times.

Anyway, I got to feeling curious about which of our fine professors and administrators decided to put their money where their mouth was and donated money to the Presidential candidates in the 2008 cycle. The results are pretty epic.

Using the Huffington Post’s FundRace tool, which aggregates the Federal Election Committee’s list of $200+ donations to single Presidential candidates, I searched for those people listing either “New York University” or “NYU” as their employer.

Of 312 donors (giving at least $200), 306 of them gave to Democratic candidates. That means that only 1.9% of the donors gave to Republicans. Donor list after the jump.

In monetary terms, NYU employees gave $266,710 to Democrats and $5,052 to Republicans. John McCain received only 4 donations totaling $1,830. Rudy Giuliani received 1 for $2,300. The last $922 went to Ron Paul. Talk about an enthusiasm gap.

Here are some notable donors:

Top Donor – Susan Anderson, Professor of Psychology – $5,600 to Hillary Clinton

Peter Unger, Professor of Philosophy – $4,600 to Barack Obama

Cheryl Mills, Senior VP and Secretary – $2,300 to Hillary Clinton (she served as Deputy Counsel to President Bill Clinton)

Mark Gertler, Professor of Economics – $520 to Barack Obama (previously interviewed on NYU Local)

Alicia Hurley, Vice President for Government and Community Engagement – $2,050 to Hillary Clinton, $350 to John Edwards

Paule Marshall, Professor of English and Author – $4,500 to Barack Obama

Thomas Cooley, Dean of Stern – $250 to Barack Obama

Lynne Brown, Senior Vice President for University Relations and Public Affairs – $500 to John Edwards and $500 to Hillary Clinton

Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education & Former US Assistant Secretary of Education – $500 to Hillary Clinton

Keep in mind that this is a loose analysis. Some of those listed were students. Nobody who donated under $200 is listed. But you get the idea.

Photo from Folioart: Jonathan Milne.

Gothamist

The advance tickets are only available to American Express members until Nov. 15, when tickets are released to the general public through Ticketmaster. Even if you’re an AmEx user, expect to empty the wallet a bit: face value of the tickets range from $60 – $1250.

Gothamist notes that the most expensive tickets are “if you want to join both presidents at a pre-debate reception for cocktails and picture-taking and awkwardness.” Okay, now that’s actually every politics major’s wet dream.

The MSG website is currently fielding suggestions for what each president should ask his counterpart, which is essentially a perfect prompt for an SNL skit. Give them your best shot, you hippie liberal!

Update: According to the NY Post, the debate “has been nixed because the promoter overhyped it as a death-match faceoff between the men.” However, promotions for the event still remain on the MSG website.

At a talk a couple nights ago hosted at the New School’s Tischman Auditorium, Marco Roth, editor at Large for n+1, introduced both Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat as voices that he and people like him rarely hear, and as potentially controversial contributors. A less charitable mind would have thought that Roth simply wheeled two Republican quasi-intellectuals out to be hissed at by an activist student body.

There were some uneasy laughs (mostly from the panel itself), and the occasional cold silence from the audience, but many more genuine moments of connection over the course of the night. The event was, undoubtedly a success if it is to be measured in the terms Roth chose; as an opportunity for liberals to get to know the opinions of some conservatives and to identify possible areas of common ground.

That should not be how the success of Douthat and Salam’s project is measured. As explained in the title of their shared work, Douthat and Salam aren’t merely interested in bringing their somewhat heterodox conservative philosophy to liberal universities; they also want their recommendations to be enacted on a party-wide scale so that the GOP can win again.

Though I have not read the book itself, I have followed both Douthat (a New York Times columnist) and Salam (a regular contributor to The American Scene) online.  Both of them are intelligent, reasonable, and approachable guys. Both of them are also on the outside of the Republican tent, trying to talk their way in. Douthat admitted during the evening that both of them would have been dubbed “Squishy Centrists” by Republican fixture Rush Limbaugh.

Douthat said that if he could peg government as a percentage of GDP he would keep it as it is now. Salam, as a social libertarian, could be considered to be even more of an outsider figure. Salam has openly backed aggressive prison reform, both on prudential and humanitarian grounds, something that would send the average Republican into an apoplectic fit.

On some level, the fervent opposition to these two seems both mean-spirited and ill advised. Neither of them seemed out of what a reasonable person would call the mainstream of center-right thought. The only two incidents of the evening that might have caused temperatures to rise were resolved almost amiably. In a discussion over race issues in the Republican party, former Chairman Lee Atwater’s infamous racist outburst comment was brought up. Both of the speakers made clear that not only had their party previously apologized for its Southern Strategy, but that trying to elicit further mea culpas was a pointless distraction from actual policy questions.

The other incident involved a point blank question about apologies for opposition to gay marriage. Both Douthat and Salam made clear that bigotry was a factor in at least some of the opposition to marriage equality, and that was unacceptable. Though Douthat and Salam openly disagree about the issue (Salam says it is an obvious question of equal rights while Douthat opposes it on religious grounds), both of them made it clear that they condemned bigotry. Even Douthat’s hemming and hawing revealed a great deal of intellectual honesty as he skirted around the issue.

Both of them reminded me of the Rockefeller Republicans that have largely become extinct throughout the Northeast. That extinct brand of GOP-er offered similar policy goals as the Democrats, but promised a little bit less hubris and a lot more efficiency, and claimed that their decisions were founded on different first principles. Salam and Douthat can be seen in this tradition. Indeed, Douthat and Salam both presented this view of America: That it is a country with a government built by smart liberals and should be occasionally governed by smart conservatives. They’ll find it incredibly difficult to convince the Republican party of the wisdom of this vision. If Conor Friederdorf’s informal survey of the GOP is anything to go by, the battle will be an uphill one. They should also ask Lincoln Chafee how it’s going.

That’s obviously not the case. It’s fall semester, and you’ve been unceremoniously jettisoned from your pre-natal activity level back into the strange, crude approximation of the real world that is NYU. And as an unwilling re-inductee into the sort-of-but-not-really-real-world, it’s quite possible that you’re going to be expected to know things about current events. Maybe you’re a journalism major, or maybe you just spent the previous school year using Barack Obama to get laid and you’re afraid that you’ll need a new shtick soon.

Either way, I’m here to help. Below are half of the major stories of the summer. The rest of the list will come tomorrow.

1.) Health Care Reform
I don’t want to say too much about this now, because it’s a really complicated subject and Charlie and I are going to be covering it in much more depth next week. But the latter half of the summer has been an arduous Congressional slugfest over health care. Look for more coverage of the various reform proposals, contentious policy points, and the major players in the debate.

2.) The Iranian Election Protests
After President Ahmadinejad won reelection under dubious (to say the least) circumstances, angry Iranians took the streets. After about a week of large-scale protests, the Khameini-Ahmadinejad government cracked down, hard, leading to a death toll that’s still a little fuzzy in the specifics. The protests seem to have largely subsided, but something tells me that Ahmadinejad isn’t going to be able to just press the reset button on this one. Stay tuned.

Side note: One of the interesting things about the protests is how Internet-fueled they’ve been. There’s the green Twitter profile pics of solidarity that became a bit of a trend in the US, but there was also the viral video of Neda Agha-Soltan being gunned down, which became an iconic scene in the resistance.

3.) Sotomayor Gets Confirmed
Not without a bit of a sideshow, of course, as conservative commentators and Republican congresspeople alike wrung their hands over whether or not Obama was trying to get a barely literate affirmative action benefactor and secret hater of white people appointed to the highest court in the land. But, kabuki show aside, Sotomayor’s confirmation was a foregone conclusion long before it came down to a vote. It remains to be seen what her lasting role on the court will be, but for now at least the bench is a little less monochrome.

Tomorrow: Dead people, new senators, car rebates and torture memos.

*With many thanks to the lovely and talented Lily Q, from whom I plagiarized this title.

**This doesn’t apply, obviously, to those of you who were taking summer classes, or full-time jobs and internships. For you brave souls, The Grind is a twelve-month concept, even pre-graduation.

Photo by Flickr user talkradionews used under a Creative Commons license.

The sexual orientation card was played often during hearings. Gay and Jewish Rep. Barney Frank said the bill would protect “people like me.” Yes, he’s gay, Jewish, and liberal. How the hell is he not an NYU alum?

By law, Republicans must stir controversy when discussing LGBT issues. Certainly, controversy was stirred when Rep. Virginia Foxx stated that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student for whom the bill was dedicated to, was “a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills.” “The hate crimes bill that’s called the Matthew Shepard bill is named after a very unfortunate incident that happened where a young man was killed,” added Foxx, “but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of a robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay.”

Yeah, I’ll let that one settle, NYU.

The Senate vote is not yet scheduled, but expect a swift decision once it reaches Arlen Specter.

(Photo via)

The 100 days benchmark provides a perfect opportunity to break out of that cycle.

Regardless of your views about his policies, when looking back over Obama’s brief tenure, it is remarkable how much he has undertaken in such a short time. He has pushed contentious legislation through Congress, embarked on a global diplomacy tour, unveiled an ambitious budget, reversed Bush policies on issues from torture to stem cell research, and changed course in the war on terror, all while trying to heal the ailing economy.

The speed at which Obama moved into action is perhaps the most impressive part of his presidency thus far. When he took office, he was confronted with a huge number of problems – a crumbling economy, two wars overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, an increasingly threatening Iran, and mountains of terrible Bush-era policies both on the domestic and foreign policy fronts. So he got right to work.

He quickly ordered the closing of Gitmo; repealed Bush’s block on federal funding for stem-cell research; pushed through a  $787 billion stimulus package to create jobs and increase demand; began to repair our relations abroad through his G20 and Latin America trips; smoothly handled the pirate hostage situation; and, most importantly, laid the groundwork for healthcare, energy policy, immigration, and education reform.

What a start.

Of course, there has also been some turbulence. Most of the problems have been minor – a poor vetting of cabinet candidates (remember all the tax troubles?), the recent idiotic Air Force One flyover – but there are a handful of serious issues.

The administration’s approach to the financial industry bailout has been ugly, coupling bad ideas with uncertain leadership. A big test in the next 100 days will be Geithner’s handling of the stress test results, which will be released on Friday.

The recently released torture memos have also generated a problem for Obama, who has taken heat from both the right and the left. Obama seems reluctant to do the right thing – prosecute those responsible for justifying and implementing an illegal (both under US and international law) torture policy.

But these issues are dwarfed by the giant steps Obama has taken in the right direction. He was elected on a platform of change. Thus far, he has delivered.

The obvious question to ask now is: what’s next? His major outline for the future comes in his budget, complete with an intellectually honest, transparent breakdown of costs. He will dramatically change our energy policy, dovetailing off the recent EPA decision, that will create thousands of jobs and dramatically reduce our dependence on oil. He will draft legislation for a badly needed overhaul of our health care system, finally making health insurance available to every American. He will further establish a progressive taxation system that stops leaving the lower- and middle-classes behind. He will reform the education system, rewarding teachers for good work and creating better curricula. And he will design a smart, practical immigration plan that avoids expensive and ineffective policies like mass deportation.

And he’ll have the help of a Democratic congress prepared to make this agenda happen (Arlen Specter’s departure from the GOP yesterday will certainly help).

At the same time, Obama will still be dealing with a painful recession and the need to be fiscally responsible. Swine flu could pose additional problems. But we never expected his Presidency to be an easy one – his task has been monumental and will continue to be so. But he has, in 100 days, skillfully handled many difficult issues and put the US on a progressive path to success.

Additional reading about the first 100 days:

Huffington Post

The Daily Beast

Politico

Talking Points Memo Slideshow

Photo courtesy of Flickr user violentz.

One NYU student even created a facebook group urging people to “Vote NO on CAS Student Council Amendments.”

Agreed. This is a democratically elected council – their attempt to limit the powerful positions for themselves, regardless of their rationale, is antithetical to democracy.

CAS students, go here to vote. Polls close on Saturday at 10:30 PM.

So GOP leadership has stepped up and supported Coleman’s plan, right? Not so much. There’s been an eerie silence from the RNC and other organizations – and some Republicans are even telling him to call it quits. MSNBC personality Joe Scarborough said this morning, “Seriously. Norm, I like you. You lost. Okay… It is seriously not fair to constituents in Minnesota to drag this out any longer. It is over Norm, okay. It is over.”

Yes, it is over, Norm. The votes have been counted; you have fewer than Al. Please fade away so reporters don’t have to continue to watch you flail away at an estimated cost of $145,181 a week.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Aaron Landry.

But the final decision on troop levels will be made by Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister. Unfortunately, he is likely damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If the region needs more troops, he’ll feel pressured to ask for them, but with that request will come a potential populist uproar. Iraqis oppose the US presence there and won’t be happy to hear that their PM decided to keep the Americans around.

If the General is right, this could be a big stumbling block for Obama foreign policy. As the administration is attempting to shift its focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, having to keep troops committed in Iraq will derail that plan (at least in the short term). Let’s hope that the recent news about a decrease in violence in Iraq doesn’t change. If we need more troops, though, to maintain a peaceful country, we must send them.

We’ve been bogged down in Iraq for over six years now. Let’s get out as soon as we can without leaving the country vulnerable to collapse.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Army.mil.