Outmaneuvered by the Reverend Al Sharpton and a broad-based coalition of opponents, the mayor was laid bare, hopelessly vulnerable as a result of his arrogance. No black leaders to turn to for help. (They'd all been repeatedly spurned.) No expressions of support from former mayors. (They'd all been mercilessly belittled.) No vote of confidence from onetime crime-fighting partner William Bratton. (He'd been publicly humiliated and forced to resign.) No kind words from the governor. (He'd been embarrassed too many times.)

Clearly, the chickens have hungrily, gleefully, and relentlessly come home to roost. In the four years since I sat with him at Huxley's, he has managed, with the help of his police commissioner, Howard Safir, and his communications director, Cristyne Lategano, his closest adviser, to turn one of the truly astounding achievements of modern government -- more than 100 fewer people a month get killed in New York now -- into a public-relations nightmare. Even worse, he has opened the door for a reversal of some of the very policies that have made the city so much safer.

Though the mayor professes publicly not to care about poll numbers, it must eat away at him that his approval ratings are, according to a Quinnipiac College poll released last week, down to an all-time low of 40 percent. (Only 23 percent of those polled approved of his handling of the Diallo shooting.) While his aides can dismiss this as a temporary, post-Diallo slide, in truth, his numbers were already heading south before the shooting.

To really appreciate how the mayor has blown it, you need to think back to 1993. It's easy to forget that in the early nineties, the quality of life in the city had deteriorated so badly and solutions seemed so elusive that people inside and outside government -- including revered urban gurus like Harvard's Nathan Glazer and devoted civic leaders like Felix Rohatyn -- were actually buying into the idea that perhaps New York was simply ungovernable.

It was a time of severely lowered expectations. If I had told you then that the city would elect a mayor who, over five and a half years, would reduce the murder rate by 70 percent, you would have thought I was crazy. But you'd probably have agreed that any politician who could do that would be the most popular mayor in this century, if not of all time. Mayor Giuliani, however, is hardly being hailed as a hero (except, perhaps, among Republicans outside New York City). In fact, he's lucky he doesn't have to run for re-election.

"It took people eleven years to get tired of Koch but only a little more than five to tire of Giuliani," says Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. "Winston Churchill was a great man, but when the war was over, they got rid of him. Well, the war is over, and if there were a way to get rid of Rudy, they'd get rid of him today."

Though the Diallo tragedy is the first full-fledged crisis of the Giuliani mayoralty, it has exposed a range of issues that have been bubbling near the surface for some time. And only some of them relate to the Police Department's behavior in minority communities.

With no articulated, substantive second-term goals (remember the civility speech?), this administration has seen its progress come to a screeching halt. Whether distracted by the mayor's next career move or hampered by the loss of key people from his first term, the Giuliani government seems devoid of ideas. And while the administration grinds along in woefully low gear as a creative enterprise, there have been recent signs of internal dissension as well. Rudy Crew, with whom Giuliani had enjoyed a solid working relationship, threatened to resign over the mayor's sudden urge to promote school vouchers. And according to City Hall sources, several longtime members of the mayor's inner circle have recently gone to him to complain about the obstructionist, bellicose role played by communications director Cristyne Lategano. They have tried to convince the mayor that if he plans to run for higher office, he must, at the very least, redefine Lategano's position.