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 Editorials | March 2007 
The Unlikely Republican Frontrunner: Giuliani
 Arlen Parsa - t r u t h o u t
| | Raw memories of September 11 rocked the race for the White House Wednesday, as a firefighters union accused Republican pacesetter Rudolph Giuliani, seen here in February 2007, of treating corpses of fallen comrades like "garbage." (AFP/Luke Frazza) |
The odds of history are against them. Only once in the past 50 years has a new president been elected after a member of his own party occupies the White House for two full terms. The only exception was when a still-popular Ronald Reagan left the oval office to Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1989.
It will be exactly twenty years later when Bush's son leaves office to the forty-fourth president of the United States on January 20, 2009. If history (and poll numbers) are any indication, it seems doubtful that the next commander in chief will be another Republican. One unlikely GOP front-runner is trying not only to buck that historical trend, but also a myriad of historical trends within his own party.
Although many pundits quibble about the qualifications or lack of qualifications Illinois Senator Barack Obama has, few seem to apply the same standards to former New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani. If Giuliani is elected, he will ascend straight from City Hall to the White House - quite the dramatic power shift. It would also be historically startling: only once in the past half-century has America elected a president without experience either as governor or vice president (the exception was John F. Kennedy, who was elected to the US Senate twice after serving as a decorated war hero - neither of which credentials Giuliani can claim).
The ex-mayor has little experience that would seem to qualify him for the nation's top job, at least compared with presidents past. Almost all of Mr. Giuliani's popularity and political viability emanates from a single event: the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The year before, he had backed out of a campaign for Senate after then-First Lady Hillary Clinton proved to be a stronger candidate than many had expected. At the time, Giuliani publicly claimed his withdrawal from the race was solely related to his prostate cancer, although few doubted that his extra-marital affair (revealed only days before his sudden withdrawal from the race) had factored into the decision.
"Getting caught with the girlfriend when you and your family are supposedly locked in fear about a life-threatening disease? Could God even spin that?" the New York Daily News quoted one of Giuliani's friends in May 2000. Many also speculated that Giuliani was truly scared to face Mrs. Clinton in a general election.
Years later, the two fixtures of New York politics may be facing a rematch. Nearly everyone recognizes the name Rudy Giuliani today (Giuliani actually trademarked his name after 9/11 in order to protect his own personal "brand"), but some experts on the former Mayor say that most Americans still know relatively little about him.
"There is a big difference between what the average New Yorker knows of him and those who don't live in New York know of him," said documentary filmmaker Williams Cole in an interview. Cole produced the 2005 film "Giuliani Time" about the former mayor's terms in office. "Giuliani Time," the product of nearly seven years of research, incorporated dozens of interviews with everyone from Al Sharpton to Donald Trump (the Reverend sharply criticized Rudy for implementing policies that hurt the poor, while The Donald couldn't stop gushing about him).
Giuliani himself declined to be interviewed for the film more than a dozen times over several years. "The fact is that he ran a tight ship, and if he didn't think you were going to be 100 percent positive, then he wasn't going to give you an interview," Cole said. "Those that don't live in NYC just know the bits and pieces of positive coverage [about Giuliani], with an occasional piece about a protest, that the national press carried about the NY 'turnaround' for many years," Cole continued, referring to Giuliani's time as mayor in the 1990s when his supporters credit him with revitalizing the city. "And of course, after 9/11, it was 'America's Mayor.'"
As the mantra goes, September 11th changed everything. And for Mayor Giuliani, the mantra was more true than for most. In his first months in office, the president's approval rating had been languishing at a less-than-admirable 50 percent. America needed a hero. Bullhorn in hand, Giuliani was happy to fill that role.
America's mayor or not, some of the events of the day that made him famous are inconvenient for many conservatives - the same conservatives who decide the ever-important Republican primaries in southern states like South Carolina. Most are unaware that on that fateful morning, Giuliani did not wake up in Gracie Mansion, the official NYC mayoral residence, but instead got out of bed in an Upper East Side apartment - an apartment that he shared with two gay men.
Gay roommates aside, nobody can say that Rudy isn't a family man. He's had plenty of families. He's even married into his own family: in 1982 he sought an annulment from his first wife, whom he suddenly discovered was actually his second cousin. This, after they had already been married for 14 years. No doubt an awkward conversation between the two (who had once spent childhood vacations together) followed that revelation.
Or perhaps there wasn't a conversation at all. Giuliani's second wife found out that her husband was seeking a divorce from her by way of the ever-gentle New York City press corps after he abruptly made the announcement at a press conference one day. By this time the couple had had two kids and he had allegedly cheated on her with two other women - one a staff member, the other a "very good friend" who eventually became his third wife. It was between divorcing his second wife and marrying the next that Giuliani had moved in with the gay couple with whom he had met and "hit it off" during his first failed bid for City Hall, years earlier.
For some reason, the biography on Giuliani's official web site mentions none of this. In fact, it does not even mention that Rudy has children. When contacted for comment on this specifically, the Giuliani campaign promised to return a phone call (they did not).
Giuliani is not unaware of the potential problems facing his candidacy. Before running for mayor in 1993 he commissioned an extensive "vulnerability study" which, when finally completed, was longer than his 400-page book on leadership (titled perhaps obviously, "Leadership"). The report proposed rebuttals to dozens of attacks his campaign expected to encounter, including what it admitted was the "weirdness factor" of Rudy's marriage to his second cousin. On this point, the study seems to defend its candidate by offering a 1989 Newsday article which reads, "Giuliani had said that he had thought at the time of his first marriage that he and his first wife were third cousins" instead of second cousins. Big difference.
Another report which pondered Rudy's possible weaknesses, this time compiled by a Giuliani staffer, was also leaked recently. "The 1993 one is a more serious one - they never did that again," a member of the national press corps with considerable experience reporting on Giuliani explained. The reporter, who did not give permission to be quoted for this piece, privately said he believed the former mayor is "not big on reflecting on his vulnerabilities these days."
"Rudy hated the '93 one, ordered it destroyed."
Republican primary voters will have to decide whether or not they can trust a man to run the country whose wife and children could not trust him not to cheat on them. But there's more for conservatives to consider about Giuliani. The GOP has never in its 150-year history nominated a candidate who supported both gun control and abortion. In fact, there has only been one openly pro-choice Republican president in history: Gerald Ford. And Ford was never elected to the White House, but instead appointed to the role of vice president, later taking Nixon's place by default after his predecessor resigned.
In 2006, while virtually all of the Republican Party was rallying around a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, Giuliani opposed the ban (no doubt pleasing the gay couple he had lived with back in 2001). Giuliani, however, sides with the rest of his party on more traditional conservative issues such as school vouchers, welfare, tax cuts and the death penalty. Like President Bush though, Rudy favors a guest-worker program which many Republicans say is equivalent to "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.
As he took the podium at a recent conservative activist conference, the audience gave Giuliani a standing ovation so long he had time to say "Thank you" more than a dozen times. After his speech was over, though, the applause seemed merely polite and somewhat distant. "We don't all see eye-to-eye on everything. You and I have a lot of common beliefs that are the same, and we have some that are different," Giuliani had told them. "I don't agree with myself on everything," he deadpanned a moment later, drawing muted, almost nervous laughter from the audience.
Arlen Parsa is a documentary film student at Columbia College Chicago. In between classes, Parsa writes about American politics and current events at TheDailyBackground.com. |
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