Giuliani's soap-opera antics have undermined his image
Posted on 01/25/2008 9:43:49 PM PST by bruinbirdman
'America's Mayor' lifted a nation after 9/11 - but this presidential candidate can often seem more Mafia don than statesman.
The last time Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III was due to face Hillary Clinton in an election, his campaign ended prematurely amid a month-long public soap opera that included the declaration that "I don't really care about politics right now".
Giuliani's soap-opera antics have undermined his image
It was the year before the September 11 attacks, and Rudy - as everyone but his mother calls him - was famous for having cleaned up the Big Apple, clamping down on squeegee merchants, jaywalkers, porn shops and petty criminals. He'd thrown Yasser Arafat out of a concert hall and declared war on the Brooklyn Museum of Arts for exhibiting a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung.
There was never much doubt about what Manhattan's liberal intelligentsia thought of him. Yesterday, The New York Times endorsed his Republican rival, John McCain, for the presidency, branding its former mayor "a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power".
But Mayor Giuliani brought crime down by 56 per cent, slashed the numbers receiving welfare by almost 60 per cent and cut taxes 23 times. The conservative columnist George Will has hailed him as "a man for whom pugnacity is a political philosophy".
That month in 2000, when he dropped out of the race for the Senate against Clinton, was a tabloid dream. His marriage unravelled (his then second wife learned their marriage was over when Giuliani announced it in a press conference), and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His wife forced him out of his official mansion and he moved into an apartment with a gay couple - who would advise him in the mornings about what tie to wear - and a chihuahua called Bonnie.
The "other woman", Judith Nathan, later to become the third Mrs G, was identified to the world with the New York Post headline: "Rudy's mystery brunch pal is Upper East Side divorcée."
This time around, though, Giuliani's campaign is in danger of ending in a whimper. He has been a footnote in the first month of the 2008 election, losing the first six contests without really competing.
Tuesday's Florida primary is his first - and possibly only - stand. Concerned that his social liberalism would condemn him in states where conservative Republicans held sway, he decided not to campaign in the early races but bet everything on the Sunshine State, where polls now show him languishing in third place. In an attempt at gallows humour during Thursday night's debate among the candidates, he quipped: "We have them all lulled into a very false sense of security now."
If it is curtains for Giuliani in Florida, where only a win can keep his ailing candidacy alive, it will mark the conclusion of a political career that gave America - and the world - an outsized character with a giant ego. To some, including himself, he was a global hero, a latter-day Winston Churchill. To others, he was a small-minded villain who seemed to have sprung from the imagination of a Niccolò Machiavelli, Mario Puzo or Tom Wolfe.
Born in an Italian-American enclave in Brooklyn in 1944, Giuliani has long displayed many of the characteristics of a Mafia don, though as a prosecutor he went after the Mob relentlessly. He has pursued grudges, engaged in legendary feuds and has always valued loyalty above all else. In New York, his assistants were known as the "Yes Rudys" or the "Shrewdys". An eruption of his temper was "the Full Rudy".
As an adult, Giuliani found out that his father Harold had done time in Sing Sing prison for mugging a milkman of $128.82 at gunpoint during the Depression.
Bernie Kerik, a man who rose from being Giuliani's driver to his police chief - and who was recently indicted for a string of felonies including fraud and obstruction of justice - remembers feeling like a "made man" when he joined the mayor's inner circle. A ceremony had been arranged in which he was welcomed with a kiss on the cheek from each fellow consigliere.
Those who crossed Giuliani did so at their peril. In 1997, a man named James Schillaci provoked Giuliani's ire by complaining about a police traffic sting in the Bronx on the mayor's radio call-in show and then contacting the New York Daily News, which ran a page one story.
Soon afterwards, Schillaci was arrested on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge later threw out the charge, but not before a police spokesman had related details of decades-old criminal offences and falsely stated that Schillaci had been convicted of sodomy. "Mr Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistleblower," Giuliani told the press. "Maybe he's dishonest enough to lie about police officers." Schillaci suffered a nervous breakdown and later won a $290,000 legal settlement from New York City - part of a colossal $7 million in civil rights payouts and retaliatory damages the city coughed up during Giuliani's tenure as mayor.
The mayor's radio show, Live from City Hall, became compulsive listening for those marvelling at that quality summed up in the title of a book by Ed Koch, one of Giuliani's predecessors: Nasty Man. A caller who wanted the mayor to legalise ferrets as pets was told: "The excessive concern that you have with ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist, not with me." Giuliani added: "There is something really, really very sad about you."
Giuliani believed he could do no wrong - and neither could his police. After a black security guard, Patrick Dorismond, was shot and killed by undercover narcotics officers in 2000, Giuliani ordered the release of his juvenile arrest record and remarked that he was not "an altar boy". It turned out that Dorismond, who had been unarmed and innocent, had been an altar boy.
To soften his image, the man whose love of opera - particularly Verdi - began at six, took to the stage, appearing in drag as Marilyn Monroe, complete with trowel-applied make-up, platinum-blonde wig, ample bust and a pink frilly gown. At a charity show in 2000, he strutted his stuff as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. All this fed into what an internal memo written by his own staff during his 1993 mayoral race had already identified as Giuliani's "weirdness factor". It cited his "wide array of conflicting answers" about his personal life, including the annulment of his 14-year first marriage on the grounds that his wife had been his second cousin. There was also concern about his Vietnam draft deferral at the request of the judge he was clerking for, on the grounds of a hearing problem.
His post-mayoral life has provided yet more soap opera. There were reports that Giuliani was estranged from his children Andrew, 22, and Caroline, 18, as a result of their strained relations with Judith, who is credited with persuading him to abandon his trademark "comb-over". It emerged that Caroline had joined a Facebook group supporting Barack Obama.
Giuliani also posed with Judith for Harper's Bazaar magazine. The couple smooched as Mrs Giuliani, 52, pulled her husband's head towards her. She was quoted as saying he was "very, very romantic" and like "the Energiser Bunny, with no rechargeable batteries".
Yet for all Giuliani's faults and foibles, his performance on September 11 secured his place in the American imagination. While President Bush carried on reading My Pet Goat and then headed for a bunker, Giuliani took charge. He told the country, with Churchillian eloquence: "We've undergone tremendous losses and we're going to grieve for them horribly, but New York is going to be here tomorrow morning. And it's going to be here forever." It was a performance that gave him a foundation to run for the White House as solid as that of Dwight Eisenhower, victor of the war in Europe, in 1952.
Back in 2000, there were always doubts about whether Giuliani's heart was in his Senate bid. Eight years on, some aides have the same fear. Giuliani's bizarre strategy of skipping the early states means that if he loses on Tuesday his presidential ambitions will be over without his having seriously joined the battle.
It would be an odd finale to the career of a lifelong pugilist. But Giuliani, giddily in love with his bride of four years, appears to have mellowed. His legacy from September 11, he may have decided, is too precious to squander in an all-out fight. Perhaps, after all, he doesn't really care about politics.
Yes. Exit stage left.
And we are supposed to find this article credible?
clearly not
This is one of the dumbest articles I have ever read.
Yes, next question.
Rudy can still do the country a favor by splitting RINO votes off McCain and keeping him from becoming the nominee.
For him to say he did not know about Kerik’s past and present is BS.
Good! I hope none of them get it. Throw the RINOs out and draft FRed at the convention!!
Correct punctuation is our friend.
Good read.
Naah-Naah-Naah-Naah, Hey-Hey Hey, Good bye.
Warm up the Bus.
When it comes to hit pieces on American pols, this Brit is no Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
He could have started with better pics of Rooty Tooty Fruity.
yitbos
Amen, brother. He won't be President, but if he blocks McCain and Huckabee he will have served his country well.
If the flaming liberal foreign trash, The Telegraph doesn’t like him, then there must be some good qualities that I have overlooked.
General principle #2) Whoever the Left attacks, we should support.
Does Fred really want it? I contributed, but he seemed to back off. Not to say of course that my contribution meant much, but I was disappointed with his late entry and early exit. That said, with Hunter and Thompson gone, we’re left with “moderates” now, to be sure. I’d hope that, after the fascist Hillery is nominated, Conservatives and Republicans will heed the call to the best candidate to ensure that she will never “take” the Oath.
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