Eastside, Westside, All Around the Town, Giuliani Is Known : New York: There have been miscues, to be sure, but the mayor enjoys a 70% approval rating. Bloodied but unbowed, he is more popular than ever in a town that prizes ‘his honor’s’ independence.

In this year of voter revolt, in this city of paleo-liberal gridlock, an incumbent named Rudy Giuliani has cracked down on squeegee men, panhandlers, unlicensed food vendors, three-card monte dealers, underage drinkers, truants, prostitutes, unlicensed drivers and sidewalk cyclists.

He has ordered the biggest cuts in city government since the fiscal crisis 15 years ago, starting with more than 100 positions in his own office.

He has suffered defeats, as well--most notably and recently, after his endorsement of extremely Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo over GOP nominee George Pataki. Cuomo’s loss left Giuliani bloodied but unbowed--and more popular than ever in a town that prizes its mayor’s independence.

“The voters want politicians to be like them--straight, honest,” Giuliani said.

A politician, perhaps, like Giuliani.

A 50-year-old former prosecutor who grew up in the days before the Dodgers moved out and the underclass moved in. A man with a slight lisp and a major comb-over, who likes to spend New Year’s Eve dancing in his living room with his wife.

A New Yorker who lacks sugar-coating. When a high school student asked about prospects for a government scholarship to law school, Giuliani told her she’d have to raise the money herself, just like he did.

When he was invited to visit a former squeegee man who had, as Giuliani suggested, gotten a job washing dishes in a restaurant, the mayor said he would wait until next year to see if the man could hold the job.

After a speaker at a neighborhood meeting in Greenwich Village complained about the street noise from portable “boom boxes,” the mayor hopped into his car to check things out.

He found not only boom boxes, but crowds of kids wandering the streets, drinking beer and raising hell. “We’ve got to do something,” an upset Giuliani told aides. The crackdown on noise and public drinking followed.

To many, Giuliani’s New York seems safer, cleaner and quieter, a place where truants must hide and panhandlers have lost their swagger, where the jails are bursting with drug peddlers and the sidewalks are free of nuisances.

Of course, it’s half mirage. A pot dealer on Eighth Avenue still mutters “Smoke.” Kids still play hooky at Coney Island’s video game arcades. A prostitute still works the shoulder of the Cross Bronx Expressway now and then during the morning rush.

But historian Thomas Kessner says impressions are important: “He’s banking on the notion that if people feel things are better, then they can actually get better over the long run.”

Not since Fiorello LaGuardia’s first term, exactly 60 years ago, has the city seen such a blast of reform. Again, a Republican of Italian descent, elected as a fusion candidate, has taken office in a Democratic city facing a fiscal crisis.

Giuliani’s independence from some municipal employee unions has allowed him to negotiate the first severance deals ever for city workers. By June, severance and attrition are supposed to have reduced the municipal work force by almost 10%.

Armed with the implicit threat to contract out services now provided by the city, he hammered out new contracts with sanitation workers and school custodians. The former, notorious for knocking off at midafternoon, must collect 20% more garbage (as well as put in a full day’s work); the latter will now have to wash the floors if the principal says to.

Giuliani has won support for his agenda by dramatically creating a sense of purpose. “There is a line that has to be drawn if you want to have a civilized city,” he said the day he announced his quality of life offensive. “This is the line.’

The police, accordingly, have been given decibel meters and told to nab noise law breakers. They have been sent to Central Park with orders to move the homeless into shelters. They have been sent on horseback to 125th Street to stop illegal street vendors.

The result: a 70% approval rating (in a city that is only 14% Republican).

But that was civics; the governor’s race was politics, and Giuliani performed with more verve than he did in either of his own mayoral campaigns.

Giuliani didn’t just stump FOR Cuomo; he stumped AGAINST Pataki--and Pataki’s patron, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.).

A Pataki victory, Rudy crowed at one point, would mean “government of Al D’Amato . . . by Al D’Amato . . . and for Al D’Amato!”

Instead of repenting when Cuomo lost, Rudy hugged him on stage and said he’d do it again.

But now Giuliani faces more potholes than a New York taxi. Pataki, who comes into office with little incentive to help Giuliani or the city, and D’Amato, a political animal with a reputation for getting mad AND getting even, are just two.

Whatever happens, Giuliani probably won’t surrender.

“Don’t succumb to the feeling that you can’t make a difference,” he said the day he backed Cuomo. “And please don’t succumb to the notion that politics cannot change.”