Worst. Candidate. Ever?

January 18, 2008

At this point, I can’t help but think Rudy Giuliani is staying in the race simply as some kind of nuisance. I’m trying to decide which of these two are more ridiculous, and I’m at a loss.

Choice A.

Rudy Giuliani’s campaign released a new ad in Florida Friday that uses footage and photographs of 9/11 and the ruins of the World Trade Center to emphasize his leadership as New York City mayor. […]

“[W]hen the world wavered, and history hesitated, he never did,” he continues, over images and footage of people running from the site of the Trade Center attacks, and the former New York mayor embracing rescue workers. “Rudy Giuliani. Leadership. When it matters most.”

Let me get this straight. Giuliani’s performance on 9/11 was superior to that of the entire world? He held a few press conferences, and wandered the city after putting his emergency response center in the wrong building. That’s “leadership”?

Choice B.

Giuliani mailing in Florida: “My belief in God and reliance on His guidance is at the core of who I am.”

Seriously? Giuliani, who has shown practically no interest in matters of faith in his adult life, is a thrice-married serial adulterer who rejects (or, at least used to reject) most of his church’s teachings on major social issues. But that’s fine, because this direct-mail piece insists that his faith is “the core” of his being.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

As long as we’re talking about Giuliani, Josh Marshall ponders whether the former mayor is the worst presidential candidate ever.

Now, we don’t have the Rudy campaign post-mortem yet. But if things go as they’re looking, I believe Rudy will have a robust claim to worst ever not so much on the basis of his top poll numbers but on the rate and magnitude of the fall. Kennedy, after all, did get plenty of delegates. Carter just beat him.

The thing with Rudy is that he was the dominant frontrunner for a year. He raised tons of money, actually shaped the whole race. Contrary to what he’s claimed he campaigned extensively in Iowa and extremely aggressively in New Hampshire. The strategy he now claims is simply an ex-post facto rationalization of the fact that he got his ass royally kicked in both states. Indeed, we’ve now had three major contests in the Republican race and Rudy has yet to bag a single delegate.

Now, despite the fact that I think Rudy’s campaign has basically flatlined, Eric Kleefeld and I just looked at the numbers out of Florida, and the extreme weakness of the rest of the field has at least made it possible that Rudy win Florida. McCain’s ahead there now and Rudy’s back in the pack in second or third. But McCain’s losing ground in South Carolina. So if Romney takes Nevada and Huck takes SC, perhaps Rudy could stride forward amidst the bodies and take first in Florida. Not likely, but not impossible.

So perhaps he’ll pull it out in Florida and then lose respectably on Super Tuesday. At the moment though, we’re well into the process and he’s gone from the dominant frontrunner, with tens of millions of dollars, to an also-ran, often running behind Ron Paul.

I don’t disagree with any of this, but I can’t help but think there’s a flip-side: Giuliani’s fall was inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

When Giuliani was still riding high last summer and early fall, most Republican voters, especially in the early voting states, had no idea he supported abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, stem-cell research, liberal immigration policies, Mario Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaign, and is a thrice-married serial adulterer estranged from his own children. Some pundits, who saw Giuliani as a credible frontrunner for the GOP nomination, said, “None of that matters because he has a 9/11 halo.” The rest of us said, “Wait.”

The key point to remember here, though, is that Giuliani hasn’t necessarily run a bad campaign, he’s just run a losing one. By the beginning of, say, 2006, both Giuliani and Mitt Romney were in the same boat — moderate Republicans in a conservative party preparing to seek votes from a far-right base. Romney decided to reinvent himself; Giuliani decided he’d repeat “9/11” over and over again and hope no one notices his record or beliefs. One of these approaches worked, the other is Giuliani’s.

He could have run the perfect campaign, giving perfect speeches, hiring perfect aides, and airing perfect ads, but it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. Once GOP voters learned who Giuliani was, he never stood a chance.

Isn’t Florida winner take all on the Republican’t side?

So Rudy could come out of there with more delegates than Mike, Mitt and John.

Scary.

  • Live by the wingnut, die by the wingnut. I think the antiabortion folks are finally becoming a stone around the neck of the GOP, which is having a hard time figuring out how to transition from wingnut control back to the center without spending some serious time in the wilderness.

  • Arguments A & B have been there in essence since the beginning of his campaign. Admit it CB…from the start you thought this guy is such a joke how can anyone take him seriously?…and then you noted the press didn’t call him on anything and became angered at his press pass. So you began to make sure Guiliani was exposed for who he really is knowing that eventually voters would open their eyes. Finally …you can relax. Everyone is seeing what you saw from the beginning…a joke with a tremendous ego that told him he “deserved” to be president. This last video is a tribute to that image of himself and it makes one laugh at him.

  • Yea, Florida is winner take all. However, Florida lost half of it’s deligates for moving the primary up. None-the-less, I doubt if Rudy will win here. He’s an also-ran, power-hungry liberal and everyone is beginning to really see it. He’s toast (Thank God)…

  • Also, Il Duce may be currently riding in second or third in Florida, but that is before the other candidates start focusing on Florida and start hammering him on many different fronts in ads, speeches and elsewhere. Once the mini- “eyes of Sauron” turn to Florida from Nevada and SC, the heat will be on Giuliani and I expect his numbers to drop.

  • Sigh. Will the morons who vote in this country ever decide to actually scratch the surface of a candidate before they decide to support him or her ? How do you answer a pollster in the affirmative about Giuliani if you don’t know anything about him ?

    Can we please have a means test to determine voter elibility ? If you watch too much of the teevee, you’re out. If you can’t pass a simple current events test, yer out.

    If you’ve ever been hypnotized into buying a vacation timeshare, or a pet rock, or an American Idol CD, yer out: you’re too gullible.

    If there was one thing that was going to make me go postal on a genocidal scale, it was when i heard, for the hundredth time: ‘who knew he (George W. Bush) was this much of a liar / thief / incompetent / idiot / maniac / dolt’ ? if we had known this before the election, we wouldn’t have voted for him’ !!

    if you had picked up a newspaper for more than four minutes a month, or quit listening to Hannity for more than ten hours a day, you could have figured that out about Bush by about April, 2000.

  • I haven’t the stomach to make a list of all the requirements a “good” Republican candidate would have to possess, but I have a feeling the demands of their three-legged stool of support are such that no one could satisfy them.

  • Giuli was riding high in the polls when he first came in. He has had a gruadual fade. Up until recently he still led in polls of some of the northeast states. It doesn’t take much to keep him believing in himself. After all there was no reason in the world the sleazy shitebird was ever mayor of New York, so he doesn’t need a reason to believe that he could be President of the US.

  • timeoutofmind @ 6: As troubling as it may be, it’s clarifying to remember that half of the population is below median intelligence.

  • Will said: “Yea, Florida is winner take all. However, Florida lost half of it’s deligates for moving the primary up.”

    Well, you can expect Guiliani to start contesting that the minute he wins, now can’t you 😉 ?

  • Rudy’s run a campaign that gambled on there being another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil before the primaries got underway so that he could win on the single issue of killing brown people. Rudy lost that gamble. Considering that Rudy’s only appeal as a candidate was in the false perception of him as a 9/11 hero, this wasn’t a bad strategy, although it does qualify him as the most cynical candidate ever.

  • The sophisticated marketing strategies that are now our political campaigns, with the willing cooperation of a braindead media, could get Hitler elected in Israel. Well, maybe not Hitler. Guiliani as the GOP candidate is my worst nightmare, but as long as two-buck-Huck is in it Rudee’s got a problem with the wingnut religious base. Those ignoramuses driven by fear, Rethug or Dim-Dem, may still see him as the strongman we need to keep us safe, which is of course utter nonsense to anyone who knows how he tried to rule NYC. But he’s still someone the Hillary-haters will vote for, and there are lots and lots of them. Getting him out of the race would give me hope.

  • Poor Rudy. 9/11 is spinning in its grave.

    BTW, I’m fairly certain that the person who writes Giuliani’s ads seriously hates him and has a wicked sense of humor. There can be no other explanation for why someone would write that the “world wavered and history hestitated.” That’s not hyperbole. That’s a joke.

  • At this point, I can’t help but think Rudy Giuliani is staying in the race simply as some kind of nuisance.

    Hence, my suggestion for a screen or stage comedy.

    Giuliani, who has shown practically no interest in matters of faith in his adult life, is a thrice-married serial adulterer who rejects

    I’m sure there are a lot of Republican wackos would turn their noses up at all the Catholics I know who have gotten divorced and remarried, or not been faithful to their spouses. But hey, this guy is famous and powerful, so . . .

  • “My belief in God and reliance on His guidance is at the core of who I am.”

    Did Rudy just say that God told him to screw around while he was married? At his core he is a serial adulterer … it would logically follow.

    If this was 2004, maybe 9/11 would have been Rudy’s ace in the hole. But this nation has grown up a bit since then. I do wonder how much the blogosphere’s interest in and publicizing of Rudy’s tawdry side contributed to the fall. I’ll bet it was a big influence.

    On the scary side. a wounded Rudy could be a bad thing. One could get the feeling that like other mocked and snubbed Gotham types he might slither into a sewer and come back as a super villain to reign havoc on us, dressed as a penguin maybe. I know it’s a stupid thought, but he does have a vengeful streak a mile wide.

  • I’m sure there are a lot of Republican wackos would turn their noses up at all the Catholics I know who have gotten divorced and remarried, or not been faithful to their spouses.

    Or cuckholded someone.

    Then again, he is not doing well in the Republican race. So maybe his history is effecting him.

    Thing is, it’s not effecting him as much as you’d think, from how some of them talk about themselves. If you’re really a Republican because you think they can stop cuckholding and adultery and divorces somehow (where everybody else can’t), you’re definitely hoping for the wrong candidate if you’re behind this guy.

  • Sure hope his “Florida Strategy” works and he gets the GOP nomination, because he really would be the worst candidate ever against any of the democrats. In any event, please join me in a new Friday countdown to the day the nightmare ends — this Sunday, it will be one leap year until George Bush leaves office (at the latest, if he’s not impeached first). TGIF Presidential Countdown: Just 368 days and finally our long national nightmare will be over.

  • I remember thinking right from the beginning that Rudy was unlikely to sell well to the GOP base, for obvious reasons. There was quite a lot of hand-wringing in the lefty blogosphere about it, though, generally saying that the fundies wouldn’t care about the abortion stand or the shagging and multiple marriages or even the gay roomies and cross-dressing, so long as Rudy projected a sufficiently authoritarian front. I never bought that.

    Anyway, the main thing I’m thankful for is someone as radically unsuitable to the presidency as Rudy won’t even get as far as a nomination. We’ve dodged a bullet. If he’d got in I think we’d end up with american death squads on the loose here in the U.S., rather like the old days in El Salvador.

  • I still think people are writing Rudy off a bit early. The whole case against him is that no intelligent person who examines his positions and character will vote for him. People who vote (or causus-I guess that is a valid verb) in early states tend to look carefully at candidates, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. SuTu is made for people with 30-second attention spans and the candidates who cater to them. No, Rudy’s strategy isn’t going to win him the nomination outright. He needs a landslide victory in Florida and he’s not going to get it. But a narrow win or close second will put him in the ballgame for Feb 5. Remember the basic premise about him we’ve seen on this blog- he’s got good name recognition and people have an instant but shallow good impression of him. The more you look at him, the worse he gets. Wholesale campaigning is made for him.
    I think he’ll win some states on SuTu, and later get bought off by McCain with a promise to make him AG.

  • every other presidential candidate has largely gotten past the details of what they’ve done in the past, even those who are touting their experience. What they’re rightly running on now, is how they plan to improve on the mistakes of this president, what they are going to do that makes them the most viable. This is where Rudy fails to understand one of several reasons why he’s losing support — he’s STILL running on his past, and largely on ONE DAY of that past. It’s getting really old. And when he does address his future plans, they’re either vague, obviously pandering, or blatantly outlandish.

  • I made a statement several months ago that the 911 Express could take Rudy 911 Giuliani just so far. Obviously, he’s run out of track.

  • Both John Connally in 1980 and Phil Gramm in 1996 raised boatloads of cash for their campaigns to seek the Republican presidential nomination with virtually nothing to show for their efforts. My memory may be faulty, but I recall that Connally won only one delegate.

  • Thankfully people are starting to wake up to what Rudy really is – a petty, arrogant, egotistical, thug who is without a moral compass. He’s become rich and famous off the blood of almost 3,000 people. Hopefully we won’t be hearing from him in the future and he can just converse with all his slimy friends in private.

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