-Yes, but this didn't arrive in a vacuum. A lot of anti-racist organizing -helped, and this goes back to the '91 war. Did W's dad have a similar press -conference on the eve of the US assault? Not to my memory.
I don't mean to diminish the anti-racist organizing that set the context for the tolerance preaching by the mainstream. Even Bush, pushing for the Arab vote in last year's election, had ironically attacked racial profiling of Arabs on airplane checks. Not exactly a moment he was reviving in memory as they detain people for suspicious looking status.
But in that sense, having the bipartisan consensus converge around an organizing goal is the culmination of organizing and it sometimes does take a key conservative figure, influenced by that organizing, to complete the consensus process struggled for over years. And Guiliani picked a good time to do it, since the window of hysteria could have opened a lot wider with the wrong person mouthing off, or just no one saying anything to attack the racial bashing that was naturally arising on its own.
At times, gut checks are useful - in their guts, a lot of liberal folks feel that Guiliani did something really important and good in those opening hours of the crisis. I think that gut check was right.
-- Nathan Newman