AUSTIN, Texas – The Clash once sang, “You need someone for a savior/Oh, Rudie can’t fail.” It won’t appease punk fans to read this, but there is no better lyric to describe the career of current presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani.

Granted, using a Clash song to endorse a Republican is as ironic as using a Lindsay Lohan song to sell Coors or Coke. But Rudy is as punk as a presidential candidate can get, because he always clashes with authority.

America’s Mayor is a twice-divorced Catholic (How do you like them apples, Pope Benedict XVI?) and a pro-choice Republican who supports immigration, gay rights and gun control. He endorsed Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo over Republican challenger George Pataki in the 1994 New York Gubernatorial race. Raised by a father with connections to organized crime, Giuliani spent his professional life as one of the top attorneys in the Department of Justice. He has a record of 4,152 convictions to 25 reversals, and he scored convictions against famous mob members.

Here are the knocks on Rudy: He’s lucky and he’s a jerk. While Giuliani generally receives credit for cleaning up New York City, his critics say he was in the right place at the right time. Wayne Barrett of The Village Voice pointed to the nation’s surging economy and dropping crime rate to explain the Big Apple’s resurgence in the mid-1990s, when Giuliani took over for David Dinkins.

But there was more to the city’s drastic turnaround than national trends, and it had a lot to do with Giuliani’s leadership. When elected in 1994, he promoted William Bratton to head of the New York City Police Department from the city’s Transit Authority. Bratton had helped restore order in New York’s subway system by focusing on small crimes such as graffiti and fare-beating. And as Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book, “The Tipping Point” Giuliani and Bratton used the “broken windows” approach on the city above the railways by focusing on smaller misdemeanors such as public intoxication and urination. These relatively minor infractions led to an atmosphere less conducive to crime, helping transform New York into one of the safest big cities in the country.

Giuliani also made major changes to improve New York’s quality of life, symbolized by the Times Square redevelopment. He broke up the mob’s control of solid waste removal in the city, saving businesses an estimated $600 million. Taxes decreased and unemployment went down during the Rudy regime. Clearly, there was more at work than national trends.

As mayor, Giuliani took some heat for being difficult to deal with. Some minority leaders in New York labeled him a racist, a claim that former Mayor Ed Koch denied, saying, “He’s nasty to everybody.” In 1996, Rudy fired Bratton after an ego clash. And, of course, he’s been divorced twice.

But Giuliani doesn’t have to be our husband or our best friend; he only needs to be our leader. The bottom line – You can question his morality, but not his mayoralty.

In 2001, Giuliani was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in the final months of his eight-year run as New York’s mayor. In that article, Bernard Kerik, New York’s police commissioner at the time, said of Giuliani, “He’s an animal, he’s obnoxious, he’s arrogant. But you know what? He gets it done. You’re not going to succeed in New York by being a sweetie. Giuliani has no gray areas – good or bad, right or wrong, end of story. That’s the way he is. You don’t like it, fuck you.”

Now that’s punk.

Throughout his professional and political life, Giuliani has gotten it done. He is a lawyer with an immaculate record and the mayor who cleaned up New York City. In other words, Rudy can’t fail.