But even without the new empowerment-zone spending, Harlem is clearly experiencing what some have called a second renaissance, referring to the area’s legendary artistic and cultural flowering in the 1920s. Starbucks recently had a grand opening on West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, and a new Pathmark supermarket, perhaps the first in a generation, has opened a few blocks away on Lexington Avenue. Harlem’s first mall, featuring the Disney Store, HMV Records and a Magic Johnson-sponsored nine-screen movie theater, is scheduled to open at year’s end.

A little over $1 billion has been pumped into Harlem housing in five years and has helped trigger a fledgling retail revolution, with outlets such as Blockbuster Video, Rite Aid and Duane Reade now becoming part of the West 125th Street main thoroughfare. That, together with a 60 percent lower crime rate, soaring rentals and upscale families pursuing reduced-priced brownstones, has led to high but wary optimism among Harlemites accustomed to having their hopes dashed.

“This is a Cinderella story about how to rehabilitate a neglected part of the city with a combination of public and private funding,” said William Shanahan of Cushman Wakefield, a realty concern. Benjamin Fox, a partner in New Spectrum Realty, said, “Corporate executives are looking at Harlem in economic terms these days, not in racial terms.”

“Harlem is hot and it’s good for business,” said Vie Wilson, a real estate broker with the upscale Corcoran Group. The neighborhood is about 25 minutes by subway to Wall Street, and although the two areas aren’t ordinarily thought to share much, they are developing common ground, according to Spencer Means, a fellow Corcoran Group agent who says he’s selling property to many Wall Streeters. His pitch is simple: Harlem is cheaper than other communities and it offers easy access to transportation.

But how long bargain basement townhouses will last is questionable. A townhouse that was $160,000 two years ago is now about $450,000, according to Wilson and other brokers in the area. Those rapidly escalating prices thrill realtors, of course, but worry locals who have lived in Harlem for years. Some acknowledge that while it’s good to see improvement in the community, the pace of redevelopment frightens them.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Haskell Gray, 42, a corrections officer who was born in Harlem and has lived there all his life. Gray said he and his wife, Nina, a nurse, couldn’t buy a brownstone in the 1980s because of red-lining by banks. Now loans for townhouses are readily available, but he can’t afford the prices that are being asked. “What are you supposed to do? It’s frustrating as all hell. It’s good we’re making improvement but I’m not sure most of us can afford it,” Gray added.

The fact that some corporate leaders say Harlem is no longer being viewed in racial terms alarms some residents, who see Harlem being taken over by major developers and worry that there is little room for the small investor. “We should have a vehicle for investing in the community, but we don’t,” said David Givens, 41, who was born and raised in Harlem. “The way the system is working, either you are a major developer or you’re not, and most of us are not. This is our community but we are not players.”

The empowerment zone could provide ways for local businesspeople to compete, by providing low-cost loans, grants and technical assistance to Harlem and South Bronx entrepreneurs. But it has been shackled by politics since its inception. Halfway through the 10-year program, New York has spent a little over $26 million of the $300 million it is alloted until 2004.

Harlem was beginning its comeback before the empowerment zone legislation, of course, and even before the recent burst of investment by private businesses. In the late 1980s, artists began to move to the neighborhood, attracted by cheap rents. Some African-American middle-class and professional people began to return, too, attracted by lower housing costs as well as a desire for community. A refurbished Apollo Theater brought a sense of tradition restored, and helped improve the area’s night life.

Then came the empowerment zones, the largest new anti-poverty initiative funded by the Clinton administration to date. Although empowerment and enterprise zones had previously been championed by Republicans, the Clinton-Gore team championed a modified version requiring community participation, and vastly expanded the funding.

There were signs of trouble from the very beginning, however. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who wrote the empowerment-zone legislation, did so while the city, state and federal government were being run by Democrats, from President Clinton to Gov. Mario Cuomo to Mayor David Dinkins. But by the time the legislation was enacted in late 1994, both Dinkins and Cuomo had been defeated and replaced by Republicans Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki.

Federal rules about how the money was spent required unanimity among major decision makers, to avoid the mistakes of previous urban renewal experiments, which have tacked between too much community control and too little, resulting in billions of public dollars being spent badly. “We didn’t want any one person deciding the fate of funds that later would disappear down some deep, dark hole,” one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

But Giuliani and Pataki are two Republicans who don’t agree with one other, much less with local Democrats. Agreement has been impossible given the political differences between community folks, Giuliani and Pataki representatives and federal officials. The mayor’s office, in particular, was tough on spending proposals. “Look at it from their perspective,” said a neutral insider. “Why should the Giuliani administration approve millions of dollars for neighborhoods that give him little or no political support? They repeatedly vote against him, so why should he give them more ammunition to beat up on him.”

The result has been gridlock. The Highbridge Community Life Center in the South Bronx is an example of a program that has been stymied by politics for months, waiting for a $500,000 grant to continue its counseling and job training for welfare recipients and high school dropouts. “All you can do is try to wait them out,” says Brother Ed Phalen, who runs the center. There are scores of programs and small businesses in the Harlem/South Bronx zone with similar complaints.

Another worry is about whether the zone will slow gentrification or hasten it. This historically black, low-income community takes pride in its status as capital of black America. But the proud Harlem of the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn, of Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Armstrong, was the same place where, in the 1920s, poverty, crime and tuberculosis rates were high. In the 1980s a Harlem hospital study concluded that a man born in poverty-wracked Bangladesh had a higher life expectancy than one from Harlem. From a peak of nearly 500,000 residents in the 1920s, the population dropped to about half that in the 1980s.

Now the population is rising again, and Harlem is gradually diversifying, with more Latinos, Asians and whites moving in, and some poor black families being displaced by rising real estate prices. Some residents hope the empowerment zone will help black families and black businesses stay in Harlem, but so far the evidence is uneven. The zone’s largest investment to date, $11.9 million, is in the Harlem USA mall, which mostly houses white-owned businesses.

Zone boosters say that now that the first logjam has been broken, more diverse projects will get funding. The Clinton administration is working hard to ease the governance glitches, because the program will be the centerpiece of Vice President Al Gore’s urban policy during the presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, the program remains popular in Harlem, despite the red tape, political squabbling and worries about gentrification. The private sector likes it and so do many low-income Harlem residents, who stand a better chance of getting jobs thanks to the funding. And despite the hype, there isn’t a stampede of Wall Streeters north yet. As realtor Vie Wilson admitted when pressed on the subject: “Maybe Harlem isn’t for everybody.”

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”

You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.

Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.

Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!

I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.

Then Giuliani ran for president. And he decided that marriage is between a man and a woman (followed by two more women). His sudden change of heart propelled him to a distant third-place finish in the Florida Republican primary, followed by his exit from the race.

Once Republican voters made it apparent that they were uninterested in the Mayor of 9/11, you’d expect that Giuliani would, with some sense of relief, stop hiding that one shred of basic decency that made him palatable. And now gay marriage will soon be a reality in New York state! But, nope. The New York Post reports:

Ten years later, Koeppel is distressed that his former house guest hasn’t returned the many calls he began making before the legislation was passed last week.

By the way: Rudy Giuliani will address a women’s club luncheon in New Hampshire next month. The dream lives!

Dear Rudy Giuliani: You will never be president. Ever. You will never actually be elected to anything again in your life. No one likes you. Your job now is to just continue cashing in on the day you happened to be in charge of New York when something terrible happened, and that job does not require that you continue to act like a bigot. Just FYI!

Polls this early are, as York should know, total hogwash. It’s a contest based on name recognition, long before most voters have started to pay attention. That’s why Giuliani led the Republican field in national polls throughout 2007, with Fred Thompson in second. Both candidates crashed and burned dramatically in the early primaries and were gone before Super Tuesday. There were four main reasons Giuliani’s campaign failed last time, and none of them have been ameliorated since:

His political record is too socially liberal. This is a guy who started his mayoral campaign in 1989 running to Ed Koch’s left and compared himself to liberal lion Fiorello La Guardia (whom he called New York’s greatest mayor). Although he shifted right when David Dinkins got the Democrats’ mayoral nomination, Giuliani remained pro-choice and pro-gay rights: He even once bunked with a gay couple and famously dressed in drag. Giuliani endorsed Mario Cuomo for governor in 1994. He was a New York Republican, not the sort who can play in South Carolina. His stance on abortion — Giuliani gave up on his brief attempt to pretend he is anti-abortion rights when it was revealed that he had donated to Planned Parenthood, the GOP’s new ACORN — would be a major sticking point. Elite national Republicans like King and York don’t actually care about abortion — see the sections in “Game Change” on how McCain advisors had no objection to putting Joe Lieberman on his ticket — but actual Republicans do. That’s why McCain reluctantly concluded that he couldn’t choose Lieberman. A pro-choice Republican nominee would either trigger significant defections from the religious right to a third-party candidate or simply prompt many of those voters to stay home next November.

He wasn’t terribly popular or successful as mayor. National Republicans may not know this, and New York Republicans like Peter King may have conveniently forgotten, but Giuliani’s political career was over before Sept. 11, 2001. His abrasive manner and controversial policies had resulted in lousy approval ratings. He was trailing carpetbagger Hillary Clinton in the 2000 Senate race before he dropped out. His vulnerabilities have never been seriously exploited by an opponent, but don’t think Mitt Romney would hesitate to unload on him in a close race, especially now that we’re four years further past Giuliani’s post 9/11 beatification.

Speaking of vulnerabilities, Giuliani has nasty skeletons in his closet, even by the standards of a Republican politician. He has been twice divorced: His first wife was his second cousin, and he  dumped his second wife for his quirky mistress, Judith Nathan, at a press conference before informing his wife in person. During the last campaign Ben Smith of Politico reported that Giuliani improperly used police escorts to take Nathan to trysts in the Hamptons. To be fair, Giuliani’s pecadillos pale in comparison to those of Bernard Kerik, a Giuliani crony who started as his driver and was ultimately promoted to chief of the NYPD. When Giuliani recommended Kerik to be secretary of Homeland Security after the 2004 election, a bevy of embarrassing revelations ensued, from his affair with publish Judith Regan in apartments near ground zero that were paid for by taxpayers and intended for rescue workers, to accepting favors from contractors with alleged mafia links.

He also has no message. Giuliani events in New Hampshire in 2008 were depressing affairs. Small crowds, silently bored to death by Giuliani droning on about the importance of lowering the corporate income tax and the various taxes he cut as mayor. It seemed that Giuliani figured he had the national security hawk vote lined up and needed to focus on fiscal conservatives (since he surely could not count on social conservatives). But his only line that drew applause was a throwaway at the end when he would mention the need to “stay on offense” against Islamist terrorism.

But that brings us to the point that Giuliani’s one major selling point — that he happened to be mayor of New York on 9/11 — has been surpassed by events since the last election. President Obama just killed Osama bin Laden, so Giuliani can hardly claim that he would be more committed to taking out al-Qaida. The Iraq war, which Giuliani vociferously supported, is viewed by everyone who doesn’t work for Fox News as a failure. Even the war in Afghanistan is increasingly unpopular. Meanwhile, the news out of the Middle East is of the Arab Spring, which gives us hope that the region will accommodate itself to modernity and democracy rather than being a fount of anger and frustration looking for a target. Giuliani’s dour and militaristic view of Middle Eastern affairs seems especially out of step with the times.

Mostly, Americans are just worried about the economy, and Giuliani already proved last time that he can’t win the nomination with an economic policy focus. Giuliani is unlikely to run, and if he does, he is virtually certain not to win the nomination. The discussion of a Giuliani candidacy is evidence of nothing so much as the desperation of Republicans who want an alternative to their current uninspiring field. But they should take heart: Michele Bachmann might still run.

Among Regan’s many charges against her old employer was the claim that a top News Corp. executive told her to lie to federal investigators about her affair with Kerik, when he was (unbelievably) being vetted to head Bush’s Department of Homeland Security in 2004. (He dropped his bid when legal troubles came to light, and he’s currently in prison for tax fraud.) The exec told her to lie, Regan said, to protect Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and a close friend of Roger Ailes. Fox-haters speculated the “high executive” was Ailes himself, given the fawning coverage the former New York mayor got from Fox, but Regan settled the lawsuit for a cool $10.7 million payment from News Corp., and the matter seemed to end there.

Today the New York Times reveals that it was in fact Ailes who told Regan to lie about Kerik – and the paper says Regan had tape recordings to prove it. Fox isn’t even bothering to deny it; where in 2007 a News Corp. spokeswoman told the paper “the company saw no merit in the filing,” Wednesday a spokeswoman said only that News Corp. had a letter from Regan “stating that Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence her with respect to a government investigation,” adding, “The matter is closed.” (News Corp. officially retracted its claim that Regan was anti-Semitic as part of its settlement.) Regan’s lawyer insists News Corp. is misrepresenting Regan’s official statement, but he declined to say more.

He doesn’t need to say more: Affidavits reviewed by the Times show Regan’s former lawyers discussing “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.” The lawyer also said, “The Ailes matter became a focal point of our work” in preparing Regan’s case against her former employer. Key to Regan’s case was her claim she had been smeared with charges of anti-Semitism to preemptively discredit her in case she ever said anything about Kerik that could hurt Giuliani. “Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,” he wrote.

You’ll recall that, in fact, back when Giuliani still seemed a viable presidential candidate, Kerik was a serious blemish on his record. Giuliani was regularly grilled not only about whether and when he knew about his former police commissioner’s many personal and legal troubles, but also about why he would recommend the man for a cabinet post. (The Bush administration was not amused.) Days before Regan dropped her legal bombshell, the Times revealed that Giuliani had in fact been briefed about Kerik’s ethics troubles by the city’s investigations commissioner before Giuliani appointed him to lead the police department in 2000.

After the Times story, the GOP candidate blithely told the Associated Press: “There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime … What Bernie Kerik did wrong did not implicate what the results were for the public.”

Classic Giuliani: Arrogant and stubborn. Now we have classic Roger Ailes: using his media power to protect a Republican political friend. Giuliani officiated at Ailes’ last wedding, and helped when Fox couldn’t get a New York cable channel. The man who started out as an aide to Richard Nixon has never left behind his party politics, despite his claims of being “fair and balanced.” We’ll see if Fox reports on the Times story.

Fittingly, the whole mess came to light because Regan’s former lawyers are now suing Regan herself, claiming she fired them on the eve of her settlement with News Corp. to cut them out of their contingency fee. The affidavits the Times reviewed were mistakenly left public; they have since been removed from the public case file. What a tangled web.

Judith Regan was last seen on the Bravo television hit “Millionaire Matchmaker,” which sets up lonelyhearts moneybags with appropriate partners. (Her TV date went well; no affidavits have come to light revealing whether she found true love.)

Bernie Kerik was last seen on Twitter, railing against the so-called ground zero mosque — from prison. It all makes sense: Fox helped gin up the mosque non-story; Park51 is only blocks from the apartment for 9/11 rescuers that Kerik used as a love nest during his affair with Regan, which Ailes wanted Regan to lie about.

And Rudy Giuliani? His presidential bid imploded in 2008, he had to fold his consulting firm last year, but the New York Post claimed last month that he’s looking at a 2012 presidential bid. The Post is, of course, owned by News Corp.