Posted on 11/15/2007 7:25:12 AM PST by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Okay, so I'm not perfect. But I get results.
That's the soft-selling pitch of Rudy Giuliani's first presidential TV ad, which will begin airing in New Hampshire Thursday, weeks after some of his Republican rivals hit Granite State airwaves.
The 60-second spot dwells on Giuliani's pre-9/11 success in driving down crime and welfare rolls as mayor. But in a veiled nod to 9/11 - as well as, perhaps, his messy personal life - Giuliani argues he has faced countless trials and still gotten results.
"I've been tested in a way in which the American people can look to me," Giuliani says to the camera. "They're not going to find perfection, but they're going to find somebody who has dealt with crisis almost on a regular basis and has had results."
Giuliani has so far refrained from spending money on TV, choosing instead to save money and hope the aura of 9/11 remains the dominant image in voters' minds. But with the New Hampshire primary less than two months away - and rivals Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on TV there for weeks already - Team Giuliani has decided to launch its own air war.
Advisers believe Giuliani can win in New Hampshire, even though recent polls show him trailing Romney by 12 points or more.
"We are confident that you will see Rudy's message resonate and the numbers will change," said one top adviser of the ad campaign, which at the moment is limited to about $300,000 in southern New Hampshire.
The ad casts pre-Giuliani New York as a dark, scary place with black-and-white images of a police officer handling a suspect, burned out tenement windows and X-rated shops. But that gives way to a Technicolor city where couples happily jog and move boxes into new homes.
Well, you see. The ad probably has no flaws, the flaws are in the candidate.
This is only the beginning. This Kerik-Regan thing is being pushed and that is only the beginning.
What next? If Rooty gets the nomination, we will all need to put on our sleaze shields because the worst is yet to come.
Worst part? It probably all going to be truth.
The ad casts pre-Giuliani New York as a dark, scary place with black-and-white images of a police officer handling a suspect, burned out tenement windows and X-rated shops. But that gives way to a Technicolor city where couples happily jog and move boxes into new homes.
Jezz, how insipid.
Sounds like some communist propaganda film from the cold war.
Follow me comrade and all will be well.
Next up - Rooty leading a Tank column like Patton.
Let's see . . .
Giuliani has so far refrained from spending money on TV, choosing instead to save money and hope the aura of 9/11 remains the dominant image in voters' minds take advantage of Fox News' generosity in providing him free air time with various Fox News sycophants who are now effectively working as part of his campaign staff.
There -- that's more accurate.
Works for me. ;)
GAIL COLLINS: Giuliani’s Ground Zero Legacy
Rudy Giuliani is going to be at ground zero next week, taking part in ceremonies to remember the victims of Sept. 11. That was inevitable — the man has so identified himself with 9/11 that it’s amazing he hasn’t tried to patent it.
It’s also a terrible idea.
After the attacks, Giuliani did his best work in front of a microphone, speaking simply and honestly to the city and the nation. Ground zero, on the other hand, is the site of his worst failure.
That’s saying a great deal when you consider that this is the man whose crack plan for disaster response involved building the city emergency command center in one of the towers of the best-known terrorist targets in the nation.
But think about this: In the final months of his mayoralty, Giuliani went to ground zero 41 times, with whatever visiting statesman, movie star or sports hero who happened to be in town. He would walk them around the edge of the disaster zone and retell the story of 9/11. They could see ironworkers and crane operators dismantling the ruins and emergency workers looking for remains of the victims. Beneath those workers, the still-burning wreckage coughed up benzene and PCB’s and asbestos. The city had received many reports about the danger of that air. Looking down, Giuliani could see that very few people — except the health supervisors — were wearing protective gear. And he did nothing about it.
Now, some of those workers have gotten sick. Since thousands of them have filed lawsuits, it’s not likely that there will be any coming to terms with the numbers soon. The city has not even acknowledged that James Zadroga, a 34-year-old New York City police detective who died in January 2006, was killed by what his family said was more than 400 hours put in at the site. But a New Jersey coroner found that Zadroga died from a disease caused by his exposure to the ground zero dust. A widower, he left behind an orphaned 5-year-old daughter who is being raised by her grandparents.
Construction workers and emergency crews who raced to a stricken New York, eager to offer their services, are now wheezing and, in some cases, sitting immobilized in their living rooms, sucking oxygen from a tank. Their families have already paid a terrible price, and either the city or the federal government is likely to wind up with a financial bill equal to the moral one it already bears.
Workers exposed to toxic air can be protected by respirators. They’re uncomfortable and heavy, and people don’t like to wear them, even when it’s important to their health and safety. So the person in charge of a dangerous site needs to make it clear that only those with proper equipment can come anywhere near it. That’s what happened in Washington at the Pentagon, where there haven’t been health problems. Over in Staten Island, where workers were examining the rubble that the ground zero crews had excavated and loaded onto trucks, people were so well-protected that some of them looked like bit players in a space movie.
At ground zero, the priority was getting the site cleared as quickly as possible to show the world that New York was back to normal. The workers were left on their own. This happened on the watch of a mayor who had been eager to save us from our own imperfect impulses by bringing down the heavy hand of the law on every jaywalker, Chinese New Year firecracker-thrower or ferret owner in the city, not to mention the famous squeegee wielders.
Giuliani also set the worst possible example. While his own expeditions to ground zero were generally confined to the areas where the air was much less dangerous, his failure to ever, ever wear serious protection sent a very strong signal to the workers: Real Men Don’t Wear Respirators.
Sept. 11, 2001, gave Giuliani an extraordinary platform from which to educate the country about terrorism and public safety. Imagine how much help he could have been if he had talked about the mistakes made, the lessons learned. But he has never admitted error.
He has never acknowledged that it might have been better if he had focused less on getting the disaster site cleared away fast, and more on getting all the workers out in one piece. Recently, he had the temerity to claim that he’s a victim, too. “I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them,” he said last month during a campaign stop in Cincinnati.
Forty-odd tours of the edge of the site with beauty queens and foreign dignitaries is not exactly the same as months of round-the-clock work on top of a mass of burning plastics. Questioned later, Giuliani copped to the universal politician non-apology — a failure to communicate. Then he added “... but I was there often enough so that every health consequence that people have suffered, I could also be suffering.”
It was, you see, all about him.
http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/09/gail-collins-giulianis-ground-zero.html
I used to wonder about the same thing, but then I had a former FBI agent explain this to me. By the 1980s the five major New York City organized crime families had become largely benign from an outsiders' perspective, and had no interest in bringing this kind of attention to themselves.
This came up in the context of a conversation I had with him about just how dangerous it must have been to go and arrest someone like John Gotti.
"I think you've watched those Godfather movies too many times," he said, "Nobody in this agency goes and arrests someone like that anymore. We just call up his lawyer, and within an hour he and his lawyer are sitting in my office drinking coffee."
Sae a Fred Thompson Ad last night in upstate NY of all places. He was seated at a stool in a coffee shop type setting talking about his roots and his conservative values.
He now has the teary eyed Oprah vote who vote on emotion.
Alot of that is the reporter's spin on the commercial. The only thing (according to this article, anyway) he says directly is that he's "not perfect."
That seems like an admission any politician not named Clinton would easily cop to.
I'm no fan of Rudy, but I don't expect him to run ads knocking himself. That would be a bit silly. 8-)
Yeah, it's "amazing that", with all of his armed security, working and living in secured buildings, and with the use of a 40,000 man armed-to-the-teeth police force, he wasn't "hit".
Meanwhile, this "elite" gun-grabber was making it more difficult for law-abing citizens to protect themselves with legally owned firearms.
I’m sure that’s exactly what most NH voters are searching for - some autocrat to clean up their crime-ridden state. /s Thanks for the description of the ad. I haven’t seen it.
With his scandals, Hillary will tear him apart. The media will support her.
“Rudy’s “mob ties”...”
Rudy’s peeps came from Italy so he HAS to have MOB ties.(sarcasm added)
The “flaw” is Rudy!
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