Giuliani's soap-opera antics have undermined his image
Posted on 01/25/2008 9:43:49 PM PST by bruinbirdman
'America's Mayor' lifted a nation after 9/11 - but this presidential candidate can often seem more Mafia don than statesman.
The last time Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III was due to face Hillary Clinton in an election, his campaign ended prematurely amid a month-long public soap opera that included the declaration that "I don't really care about politics right now".
Giuliani's soap-opera antics have undermined his image
It was the year before the September 11 attacks, and Rudy - as everyone but his mother calls him - was famous for having cleaned up the Big Apple, clamping down on squeegee merchants, jaywalkers, porn shops and petty criminals. He'd thrown Yasser Arafat out of a concert hall and declared war on the Brooklyn Museum of Arts for exhibiting a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung.
There was never much doubt about what Manhattan's liberal intelligentsia thought of him. Yesterday, The New York Times endorsed his Republican rival, John McCain, for the presidency, branding its former mayor "a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power".
But Mayor Giuliani brought crime down by 56 per cent, slashed the numbers receiving welfare by almost 60 per cent and cut taxes 23 times. The conservative columnist George Will has hailed him as "a man for whom pugnacity is a political philosophy".
That month in 2000, when he dropped out of the race for the Senate against Clinton, was a tabloid dream. His marriage unravelled (his then second wife learned their marriage was over when Giuliani announced it in a press conference), and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His wife forced him out of his official mansion and he moved into an apartment with a gay couple - who would advise him in the mornings about what tie to wear - and a chihuahua called Bonnie.
The "other woman", Judith Nathan, later to become the third Mrs G, was identified to the world with the New York Post headline: "Rudy's mystery brunch pal is Upper East Side divorcée."
This time around, though, Giuliani's campaign is in danger of ending in a whimper. He has been a footnote in the first month of the 2008 election, losing the first six contests without really competing.
Tuesday's Florida primary is his first - and possibly only - stand. Concerned that his social liberalism would condemn him in states where conservative Republicans held sway, he decided not to campaign in the early races but bet everything on the Sunshine State, where polls now show him languishing in third place. In an attempt at gallows humour during Thursday night's debate among the candidates, he quipped: "We have them all lulled into a very false sense of security now."
If it is curtains for Giuliani in Florida, where only a win can keep his ailing candidacy alive, it will mark the conclusion of a political career that gave America - and the world - an outsized character with a giant ego. To some, including himself, he was a global hero, a latter-day Winston Churchill. To others, he was a small-minded villain who seemed to have sprung from the imagination of a Niccolò Machiavelli, Mario Puzo or Tom Wolfe.
Born in an Italian-American enclave in Brooklyn in 1944, Giuliani has long displayed many of the characteristics of a Mafia don, though as a prosecutor he went after the Mob relentlessly. He has pursued grudges, engaged in legendary feuds and has always valued loyalty above all else. In New York, his assistants were known as the "Yes Rudys" or the "Shrewdys". An eruption of his temper was "the Full Rudy".
As an adult, Giuliani found out that his father Harold had done time in Sing Sing prison for mugging a milkman of $128.82 at gunpoint during the Depression.
Bernie Kerik, a man who rose from being Giuliani's driver to his police chief - and who was recently indicted for a string of felonies including fraud and obstruction of justice - remembers feeling like a "made man" when he joined the mayor's inner circle. A ceremony had been arranged in which he was welcomed with a kiss on the cheek from each fellow consigliere.
Those who crossed Giuliani did so at their peril. In 1997, a man named James Schillaci provoked Giuliani's ire by complaining about a police traffic sting in the Bronx on the mayor's radio call-in show and then contacting the New York Daily News, which ran a page one story.
Soon afterwards, Schillaci was arrested on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge later threw out the charge, but not before a police spokesman had related details of decades-old criminal offences and falsely stated that Schillaci had been convicted of sodomy. "Mr Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistleblower," Giuliani told the press. "Maybe he's dishonest enough to lie about police officers." Schillaci suffered a nervous breakdown and later won a $290,000 legal settlement from New York City - part of a colossal $7 million in civil rights payouts and retaliatory damages the city coughed up during Giuliani's tenure as mayor.
The mayor's radio show, Live from City Hall, became compulsive listening for those marvelling at that quality summed up in the title of a book by Ed Koch, one of Giuliani's predecessors: Nasty Man. A caller who wanted the mayor to legalise ferrets as pets was told: "The excessive concern that you have with ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist, not with me." Giuliani added: "There is something really, really very sad about you."
Giuliani believed he could do no wrong - and neither could his police. After a black security guard, Patrick Dorismond, was shot and killed by undercover narcotics officers in 2000, Giuliani ordered the release of his juvenile arrest record and remarked that he was not "an altar boy". It turned out that Dorismond, who had been unarmed and innocent, had been an altar boy.
To soften his image, the man whose love of opera - particularly Verdi - began at six, took to the stage, appearing in drag as Marilyn Monroe, complete with trowel-applied make-up, platinum-blonde wig, ample bust and a pink frilly gown. At a charity show in 2000, he strutted his stuff as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. All this fed into what an internal memo written by his own staff during his 1993 mayoral race had already identified as Giuliani's "weirdness factor". It cited his "wide array of conflicting answers" about his personal life, including the annulment of his 14-year first marriage on the grounds that his wife had been his second cousin. There was also concern about his Vietnam draft deferral at the request of the judge he was clerking for, on the grounds of a hearing problem.
His post-mayoral life has provided yet more soap opera. There were reports that Giuliani was estranged from his children Andrew, 22, and Caroline, 18, as a result of their strained relations with Judith, who is credited with persuading him to abandon his trademark "comb-over". It emerged that Caroline had joined a Facebook group supporting Barack Obama.
Giuliani also posed with Judith for Harper's Bazaar magazine. The couple smooched as Mrs Giuliani, 52, pulled her husband's head towards her. She was quoted as saying he was "very, very romantic" and like "the Energiser Bunny, with no rechargeable batteries".
Yet for all Giuliani's faults and foibles, his performance on September 11 secured his place in the American imagination. While President Bush carried on reading My Pet Goat and then headed for a bunker, Giuliani took charge. He told the country, with Churchillian eloquence: "We've undergone tremendous losses and we're going to grieve for them horribly, but New York is going to be here tomorrow morning. And it's going to be here forever." It was a performance that gave him a foundation to run for the White House as solid as that of Dwight Eisenhower, victor of the war in Europe, in 1952.
Back in 2000, there were always doubts about whether Giuliani's heart was in his Senate bid. Eight years on, some aides have the same fear. Giuliani's bizarre strategy of skipping the early states means that if he loses on Tuesday his presidential ambitions will be over without his having seriously joined the battle.
It would be an odd finale to the career of a lifelong pugilist. But Giuliani, giddily in love with his bride of four years, appears to have mellowed. His legacy from September 11, he may have decided, is too precious to squander in an all-out fight. Perhaps, after all, he doesn't really care about politics.
Romney will have to answer about the disaster in Mass that is brewing right now with their health care mess that he is taking credit for now.
The Dems know this and it is why they, through their press, have masterfully shaped the opinions of millions of stupid self professed republicans.
I am so sick of these people who have nothing but government as their source of contacts for making money. I want someone who knows how to live and be succsessful in something independent of government.
Say what you want about Thompson, Romney, and even Paul, they can actually DO SOMETHING in private life to support themselves financially without the help of some government excess (that includes lawyering).
And the fact that Duncan Hunter was a soldier who was paid by the government, he was a damn good one who would have been a fine mercenary.
Here's the deal on Rudy's so-called "cancer" scare.
FReeper calcowgirl did the research from puclic documents; in Sept 2007, she posted her findings:
Rudy quit the Senate race, announcing he had cancer, but he was up and working almost immediately after quitting the Senate race. To those playin' violins about his debilitating cancer and the chemo treatment, here are excerpts from published news reports that tell the real story:
Rudy had radioactive seed implantation on September 15 and was up on his feet in one day. There was no chemo.
He missed a day or two of work and within a week he had marched in a parade, presided over a town hall-style meeting, gone on the stump for Lazio, and conducted daily press conferences, including one pushing a $1 Billion taxpayer-subsidized stadium in Manhattan's West Side after holding meetings with both the Yankees and Jets owners that week.
In May 2000 he dropped out a mere 11 days before the State Convention where he was to be nominated leaving the GOP high and dry (with no other choice but to recruit Lazio).
His doctors said they thought campaigning was perfectly within his physical capabilities; if he started treatment right way, he would have recovered and been "full speed" by the time the campaign normally kicked in. Instead, he delayed that procedure until September.
Rudy dropped out because a) he figured he was going to get his arse whooped, and, b) he had organized several global businesses and a global law firm that were earning him a million dollars per month.
That’s right. That’s what citizen government is all about. And being a rich citizen doesn’t make you any less a citizen.
Another dupe taken in by Giuliani's baffle-gab.
Giuliani just announced his top staffers are working gratis---b/c Giuliani wants voters to think he managed to spend all his campaign money without having actually competed in any of the early primary/caucus states.
Baloney. The truth is that Rudy spent all his money because he HAS competed in all those states, and he lost dismally. The number of times Rooty went to New Hampshire to campaign was second only to Romney.
Rudy just CLAIMS he hasn't been competing because the results show he is a bigtime loser, a political reject, trounced by primary/caucus voters.
Giuliani practically lived in Florida to get his campaign launched---and he can't even get transplanted New Yorkers in Fla to rally behind him. Giuliani's flim-flam game has made him lose whatever credibility he had left (not much).
Although Giuliani talks big, and tries to cast himself as a warrior/hero, he cuts and runs when he feels competitive pressure. He chickened out of the Senate race vs. Hillary. More recently, he cut and run in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and now South Carolina. He's the gutless wonder....a talker, not a doer.
only your ignorance surpasses your wordiness.
Rudy is the only candidate who actually has accomplished anything....and working a few hours a day is a lot different from having an 18 hour a day campaign.
I like Romney too but he does have that priveledged background that will be easy for Dems to attack and also his failures in Mass healthcare reform are beginning to take shape.
Heheh-—Johnny likes Rooty getting the hook.
If Arafat had been Irish or Italian, Giuliani would have been sitting next to him in Lincoln Center that evening.
Rudy definitely has gonads.
I noticed in the debate the other night that McCain & Romney showed a certain respect for him. I hope that either would consider Rudy for a cabinet position (i.e. HOMELAND SECURITY.)
Rudy for President
Long past time.
Is it time for the media to stop trying to tell the voter what to do? This the USA. Anyone who can and wants to can run for office and they drop out when they choose, not when the media and leftists decide. JMO. And I’m not a Rudy voter.
It's almost springtime and Rudy and Bernie will be celebrating together. It's all so beautiful.
“Giuliani’s bizarre strategy of skipping the early states means that if he loses Florida on Tuesday his presidential ambitions will be over without his having seriously joined the battle.”
Rudy’s trying to make his early losses out to be some sort of master strategy; he would have won those early states if he could have. His campaign is in serious trouble.
Looks like someone did.
Reminds me of how former Mayor LaGuardia would go to rallies denouncing Hitler, yet then attend Italian-American pro-Mussolini rallies the same day.
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