Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s personal life has been a mess for quite a while. No one needs to go dumpster diving to learn the details; they’re all out in the open — three marriages (including one to his cousin), repeated extra-marital affairs, left his second wife by way of a press conference (he told reporters before telling his spouse), estranged from his kids. “Family Man of the Year” he is not.
Apparently, though, no one is supposed to talk about this. Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D), a close Hillary Clinton ally, had the audacity to allude to reality during a TV interview this week, and all of a sudden, our suddenly-scandal-averse press corps are all a flutter.
Rudolph W. Giuliani’s marital history seeped into the presidential campaign yesterday, a day after a supporter of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton drew attention to Mr. Giuliani’s personal life in a television interview in New York.
Mr. Vilsack told New York 1, the cable news channel, that voters in the rest of the country would come to know details about Mr. Giuliani’s life that people in New York have known for years…. Pressed for details, Mr. Vilsack replied: “I can’t even get into the number of marriages and the fact that his children — the relationship he has with his children — and what kind of circumstance New York was in before September the 11th and whether or not he could have even been re-elected as mayor prior to September the 11th.”
The Giuliani campaign swiftly linked the remarks to Mrs. Clinton. “It’s not surprising the Clinton campaign is going negative and personal so early,” a statement from the Giuliani camp said.
Maybe someone can explain this to me. Rudy Giuliani is willing to march in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade with his mistress — an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that an NYC columnist compared it with “groping in the window at Macy’s” — but in the midst of a presidential campaign, it’s wrong to suggest that Giuliani has a messy personal life?
Who wrote these rules? And why didn’t they apply in the 1990s?
So far, the bulk of the media attention is skipping right over the fact that Vilsack’s comments were accurate, and instead dwelling on the notion that he brought up some verboten subject. Here’s ABC’s Jake Tapper, for example:
Despite Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton’s longtime stated opposition to “the politics of personal destruction,” one of her top advisers has attacked the personal life of Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani.
Though this may be the first such high-profile attack on the personal life of a presidential hopeful launched in this highly competitive election season, the New York senator notably refused to distance herself from the comments.
Look, the media has been extraordinarily polite. Every reporter in the country knows about Giuliani’s scandalous personal life, but they’ve apparently all decided that there’s no reason to cover a presidential race by noting a candidate’s shameful conduct.
I’m just not sure how the media managed to come to this conclusion now, while holding the Clintons to an entirely different standard. In 1992, every major news outlet in the country insisted that Bill Clinton had “character” issues after a tabloid ran a story about an affair. This breathless interest in his personal life continued on through his presidency — and beyond.
Indeed, as recently as a year ago, the New York Times published a 2,000-word, front-page dissection of the Clintons’ marriage. It contained no real news, few named sources, and plenty of gossip masquerading as political coverage. Observing that the Clintons typically spend 14 days of each month together — hardly unusual for a couple that includes a senator and a peripatetic former president — the Times opted for the half-empty conclusion that the two lead “largely separate lives.” The story also made an oblique reference to a Canadian politician named Belinda Stronach, the significance of which would likely be grasped only by insiders and people who read tabloids at supermarket check-outs. In a cover article last year, the Globe claimed that Stronach and Clinton were more than just good friends.
But if Vilsack mentions Giuliani’s personal life, even in passing, it’s the “politics of personal destruction”? Are you kidding me?
Even Giuliani himself said at a recent GOP debate, “The reality is that I think someone’s private life, someone’s family life, is something that you all look into to determine how are they going to conduct themselves in public office.”
With all of this in mind, why do reporters want us to believe that Vilsack did something wrong by alluding to accurate scandals that the media already knows about?