Go Rudy Go!!
Posted on 01/07/2007 11:46:24 AM PST by wagglebee
THERE is one woman who could cause Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, more problems than Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House: she is Donna Hanover, his second wife, writes Sarah Baxter.
Hanover, an actress and broadcaster, was enraged by Giuliani’s flagrant infidelity towards the end of their 18-year marriage and the divorce case was vicious. Giuliani’s advisers fear that she could be a loose cannon in the 2008 campaign.
Giuliani was acclaimed as the “mayor of America” for his heroic role during the attacks on September 11, 2001 and is revered for his leadership. At the time he was living in the spare room of an apartment belonging to gay friends after Hanover forced him out of Gracie Mansion, the official residence.
Hanover refused to confirm that she would vote for Giuliani as mayor of New York even when she was married to him. “What kind of wife is that?” Raoul Felder, Giuliani’s lawyer, fumed. “She’s essentially saying she’s not going to vote for him.”
Hanover once stood outside a shower at Gracie Mansion, expecting to confront Judith Nathan, Giuliani’s mistress, now his third wife. In the event, a startled golfing friend of Giuliani’s emerged.
Hanover was also accused of a lack of sympathy while the former mayor was battling prostate cancer, by banishing him to a spare bedroom and exercising noisily on a treadmill at 5am.
New Yorkers relished the details of Giuliani’s larger-than-life personal story. But conservative “values voters” could be different, as Giuliani’s own aides noted in a 140-page memo leaked last week by supporters of a rival candidate.
The campaign dossier suggested that Hanover could be one of several potentially “insurmountable” vulnerabilities that could cause him to drop out of the race. It was an embarrassing start to a campaign that is not yet officially under way.
Giuliani’s record in fighting crime and terrorism has placed him at the top of several polls for the 2008 Republican nomination, edging out Senator John McCain in popular support. But the party base may be turned off by his support for abortion, immigration, gun control and gay rights (although not gay marriage). It is their votes that he needs to secure the nomination.
“It would be one thing if Giuliani could say, ‘I’m a strong social conservative in my private life’, but he can’t even say that,” said Ramesh Ponnuru, a conservative commentator and author of The Party of Death, an attack on social liberalism. “It’s not just the fact of his multiple marriages, it is the way the Hanover marriage melted down. It was operatic.”
When Giuliani met Hanover on a blind date in the early 1980s, his first marriage to Regina, his second cousin, was already over. Hanover, who went on to appear in the television series Ally McBeal, was a glamorous soulmate who seemed to enjoy the spotlight as much as he did.
They had two children, Andrew, 21, and Caroline, 17, but in 1996 Hanover stopped calling herself by his last name and a year later Vanity Fair magazine said that he was having an “intimate relationship” with a senior member of his staff.
In 2000, without telling Hanover first, Giuliani announced at a press conference that he was separating from her. She retaliated by accusing him of being unfaithful with the employee, but he was already with Nathan.
Maggie Gallagher, a family values campaigner, was outraged by Giuliani’s “scummy” performance, accusing him of making Bill Clinton “look good as a husband and father”.
New Yorkers learnt during the divorce case that their cancer- afflicted mayor was temporarily impotent and Hanover demanded a huge settlement, including £760 a month to care for Goalie, the family’s golden retriever.
Felder struck back, accusing Hanover of being an “uncaring mother” who was “howling like a stuck pig”.
In the end Giuliani, who was beginning to earn big consultancy fees after September 11, agreed to a settlement of $6.8m to avoid the full horror of a court case.
Hanover has married Ed Oster, her university sweetheart, and written a book, My Boyfriend’s Back, about rekindling an old romance. Even if she stays mum, there is enough in the public domain to rattle conservatives. Yet however vicious the personal attacks on Giuliani, they are unlikely to dent his reputation for competence. He did, after all, handle the September 11 attacks while bunking with gay friends in the midst of an affair and a divorce battle.
There you go again.
The circumstances of Reagan's divorce were not the same. Moreover, the divorce was more than thirty years behind him. He had consitently demonstrated exceptional emotional and moral stability and integrity by the time he ran for president.
Giuliani has not demonstrated requisite emotional and moral stability and integrity. A man who cannot exercise the necessary self-discipline to be faithful to his wife and children cannot be trusted to be faithful in other things.
Ding ding ding... we have a winner...
Perhaps they just want to set us true conservatives up with another round of "it your fault that republicans didn't win" in 2008 arguments.
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Guiliani is a loser on so many levels that is appalls me that people even consider him.
I'll vote for Bullwinkle too. We might just be getting a grass-roots movement going here.
I haven't decided who I'm voting for, but I hate to see everyone dumping on someone who has clearly shown backbone when we are in the middle of a war of survival.
If this were another time, I probably wouldn't even consider the man, but I want someone in there who is going to stand up to the terrorists and make them quake in their boots.
-he won't last the year out. Just my prediction.
Go Rudy Go!!
It does not matter who did what long ago... it only matters what happens now...
Turning the general election into a second Democrat primary will not get my vote.
Period.
I'll take Reagan's advice and vote with my feet...
The problem with Ex-Wives is they remember EVERYTHING. Every tittle and jot. They have photographic memories. Shakespeare was right about women scorned.
Giuliani's problem is he was so flagrant about it...He publically humiliated his wife. Infidelity is one thing. Flagrant in your face ,public infidelity is another.
If Hannover wants to keep Giuliani on the tabloid front pages I'm sure she has a quiver full.
Who would marry a woman that would do "Vagina" anything?
And the majority of Americans just voted for the dems who promised to cut and run out of Iraq. Queen nancy is reveling in her plans to do just that.
But there was a time when a divorced person such as Reagan could not have been elected, just as Catholics were out of the running prior to Kennedy. After Clinton, what can anyone say about infidelity, the media is showing a lot of hypocricy here. When we find the perfect candidate with all the morality and views some here wish for, he or she probably won't have the other qualities needed to reach the electorate or to lead if by some miracle there is a victory by the GOP in '08 with a currently unknown perfectly devoted husband/father/conservative.
Of course, any real conservative won't even get that far because they will already know that Rudy is not a conservative in any sense of the word.
Opps, after three kids, I retract my previous statement as misleading.
I can't support someone who is a scum. Maybe you will lower yourself with that kind of rationale, I won't.
What? Are you entitled to your own facts and version of history? What a stupid post.
only if you're a 'rat
Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt come to mind. They were cousins too, twice removed I think.
First off, Hollywood of the 30`s, 40`s and 50`s wasn't the same Hollywood of today. Since the beginning of civil marriages, most divorces ahve been acrimonious. Until 1962, Reagan was a Democrat, a conservative Democrat! Finally, Patty and Ron Jr were the two Reagan children who didn't get along with their Father in their younger days. Maureen and Michael never had big problems with their Father.
Btw, Rudy Giuliani is no Ronald Reagan. The comparision is insulting to the legacy and memory of a great American.
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