Failure to Launch: A Requiem for Rudy
“More to the point, the former mayor had spent far too many years of supporting abortion rights, gay rights and his own right to live as he pleased. He could never convert the social conservatives at the core of the Republican primary electorate.”
For years to come, students of politics and the media will study Rudy Giuliani's bid for the White House and marvel at its curious trajectory.
A year ago, many of us in the political speculation business were contemplating a Giuliani candidacy and dismissing its prospects out of hand. No one could imagine this lifetime New Yorker standing in the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, chatting as thought he had all the time in the world.
More to the point, the former mayor had spent far too many years of supporting abortion rights, gay rights and his own right to live as he pleased. He could never convert the social conservatives at the core of the Republican primary electorate. Once his full record as mayor and personal pecadilloes had been publicized, they would obscure his heroic moments of Sept. 11, 2001. The Rudy reality would undermine the mayor's myth.
No sooner had this become conventional wisdom than it began to erode. Giuliani attracted substantial contributions and moved to the top of the national polls, benefiting in part from the early collapse of putative frontrunner John McCain.
One reason was that national security stood out in mid-2007 as the one issue on which the Republican coalition remained united, and Giuliani seemed to have the patent on getting tough with the terrorists.
Moreover, he found ways to talk about abortion, gay rights and social liberalism that elided his past positions in a flurry of future pledges to appoint "strict constructionist" judges. This is well understood code for being anti-abortion when it counts most, at the moment a vacancy opens on the U.S. Supreme Court.
More than a few of us found ourselves re-evaluating our dismissal of Giuliani. He climbed to nearly 40 percent in the national trial heats within the GOP, attracting the votes not only of econo-cons and national security mavens but of social conservatives as well.
Much of the Bush White House seemed to be in his camp, along with the remaining neo-conservative establishment (still smarting from its reversals in Iraq). Influential media such as the Weekly Standard, FOX News and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal began to rally round Rudy as their best bet to maintain the Bush agenda of tax cuts at home and toughness abroad.
But in the fall, a series of bad news developments sapped the Giuliani momentum just as it had begun to pick up speed. Unflattering stories portrayed his White House ambition as primarily the brainchild of his third wife, Judith Nathan, who had alienated him from his children. Then Bernard Kerik, a longtime associate whom Giuliani had made police commissioner, was indicted for defrauding the government -- among others.
At about the same time, the National Right to Life Committee endorsed Fred Thompson for president, saying its priority was to deny Giuliani the nomination at all costs. A straw poll in Iowa and a conference for evangelicals in Washington D.C. served to elevate Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee for their professed loyalty on social issues.
But the worst thing for Giuliani may have been the apparent success of the surge, the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq. The more the surge worked, the less Iraq got out on page one. And the less news there was from that region, the less voters were peoccupied with terrorism. As night follows day, the Giuliani message declined in salience. Soon, anxieities over the housing market and potential recession would push the memory of Sept. 11 farther from the immediate consciousness of the voters.
Giuliani's standing in national polls declined steadily from its peak in August 2007 to the day of the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3. By then, Giuliani had decided the snows of Iowa were not for him and moved on. He spent time and money in New Hampshire, but not to the degree he needed to overcome his negatives in New England.
Unwilling to make his first big bet in Michigan, Nevada or South Carolina, Giuliani found himself betting it all on Florida, the last primary before Super Tuesday. The strategy was bold; no one had ever waited so long to win a primary and then succeeded in winning the nomination. But for a moment, it had a kind of plausibility. Three different candidates won the first three big events, and the field looked shattered and ready for a new leader.
The problem was that Giuliani's weeks of campaign ads and appearances in Florida were not enough to hold his early lead in the polls there. Mike Huckabee rose to challenge him, and when he fell back for lack of funding, Mitt Romney and John McCain rode in on the momentum of their wins in early states.
When the Florida field got crowded, Giuliani found himself crowded out. On primary day, it did not make it to 20 percent of the vote, and he folded his tent the following day.
In the end, it may have been that Republican voters were intolerant of anyone with Giuliani's past. Once they opened the book on his career and began to read, his chances were zero.
Or it may have been even more basic than that. Giuliani gave up too early on the early states, having decided there was just a little too much cold and snow to stand there, after all.
1:17 AM ET | 01-31-2008 | permalink
