I have to admit, I found Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign enormously entertaining. From the moment he announced I was pretty confident his chances of winning the GOP nomination were about as good as my chances, but he offered humble bloggers like me a seemingly endless supply of mockery material. I was almost sorry to see him go.
Imagine, then, what a pleasant surprise it is to see the McCain campaign decide that Giuliani deserves to be front and center once again.
Rudy is now officially John McCain’s lead crooner when it comes to singing the GOP’s Dems-are-weak-on-terror golden oldie.
On a conference call with reporters just now, Rudy bashed Obama and Dems as weak and “defensive” and unleashed a whole bunch of boilerplate that we’ve been hearing for many years and will hear for many, many more…. You don’t need to know the rest, because it’s just Rudy singing from the same sheet music the Republicans have been using since 2002.
But Rudy’s emergence begs a serious question: How much authority will the national press accord Rudy as a voice on terrorism during the general election?
If we’re really, really lucky, Giuliani will become McCain’s leading surrogate on the issue. Because by any reasonable measure, there are very few figures in public life who are as completely incoherent on counter-terrorism as Rudy Giuliani.
Indeed, the fact that McCain would put Giuliani out there as his voice/attack-dog speaks volumes about his dubious judgment.
First, right off the bat, Giuliani attacked Obama this morning for taking a position that Giuliani himself used to take. Giuliani’s argument, in other words, was effectively, “You can’t trust Obama; he agrees with me.”
Second, maybe the McCain campaign can take a moment to explain why it’s asked Giuliani to be a leading surrogate on counter-terrorism given Giuliani’s humiliating record on the issue?
And finally, if McCain thinks Dems are going to be intimidated by the former mayor, he’s going to be very disappointed.
“Democrats are not going to be lectured to on security by the mayor who failed to learn the lessons of the 1993 attacks, refused to prepare his own city’s first responders for the next attack, urged President Bush to put his corrupt crony in charge of our homeland security, and was too busy lobbying for his foreign clients to join the Iraq Study Group,” DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney said. “Rudy Giuliani, can echo the McCain campaign’s false and misleading attacks, but he can’t change the fact that John McCain is promising four more years of President Bush’s flawed and failed policies on everything from energy security and the economy to the war in Iraq.”
And then there’s Sen. Joe Biden, who offered two of my very favorite moments of 2007 when he went after Giuliani here and here. Now that Giuliani’s is crawling back out into the sun to launch nonsensical attacks, Biden is stepping up once again.
“It’s no surprise that it takes a man with zero national security and foreign policy experience to defend the policies of John McCain and President Bush,” Biden said…. “Sen. McCain insists that Americans must choose between our values and our security. That’s exactly wrong. Our values reinforce our security. Our failure to live up to them has been Al Qaeda’s biggest recruiting tool.” […]
Rudy has no foreign policy experience. His aura of national security experience comes solely from the fact that he hit the political jackpot by being mayor of New York on 9/11. The notion that he has any kind of counter-terrorism expertise is an illusion that flows from the countless pictures and video clips of him striding through the smoke and dust after the attacks.
And the only reason there are so many of those pictures and video clips is because Giuliani overrode the advice of experts and put his emergency response center in the wrong building, leading him to wander around on 9/11, wondering what to do.
McCain wants this guy to be his voice on counter-terrorism? Please don’t throw me in that briar patch….