If you keep Rudy away from the social issues, he can be quite an asset politically. I don’t know if he and Perry are really that close or whether Perry simply found Rudy more presidential than Romney, Huckabee or McCain. Rudy still had that “America’s Mayor” vibe going at the time.
I do think Perry has networked rather well without relying on the Bush Beltway clique. He’s been governor long enough to have made connections in most of the critical states.
Rudy is all hype. Here’s just one instance.
“As United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat,” he told the Jewish audience, referring to the infamous 1985 slaying of a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old New York businessman aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian ship hijacked off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian extremists. “It’s honestly the reason why I knew so much about Arafat,” says Giuliani. “I knew, in detail, the Americans he murdered. I went over their cases.”
On the contrary, Victoria Toensing, the deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in Washington who filed a criminal complaint in the Lauro investigation, says that no one in Giuliani’s office “was involved at all.” Jay Fischer, the Klinghoffer family attorney who spearheaded a 12-year lawsuit against the PLO, says he “never had any contact” with Giuliani or his office. “It would boggle my mind if anyone in 1985, 1986, 1987, or thereafter conducted an investigation of this case and didn’t call me,” he adds. Fischer says he did have a private dinner with Giuliani in 1992: “It was the first time we talked, and we didn’t even talk about the Klinghoffer case then.”
Victoria Toensing has no reason to lie and has great credentials as a conservative. But this is just the tip of the Rudy iceberg.
Those were our choices in the last TX primary and McCain had already won the nomination before we voted.
I voted for Romney in the primary, not because I liked him but because I wasn't about to vote McCain.