The American Spectator

Political Hay

"Rudy Giuliani [is] probably the most under-qualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency," Sen. Joe Biden declared during Tuesday's Democratic debate in Philadelphia. "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11."

The crowd roared with laughter, and liberal blogger Josh Marshall wrote, "Okay, I may have to endorse Biden after this tear against Rudy."

With the end of the dreaded Bush era approaching, Rudy Giuliani has slowly begun to supplant the President as the leading hate figure among liberals, a reality that will only help Giuliani in his efforts to overcome his differences with conservatives and win the Republican nomination.

Within the past month, the New Republic, the Nation, and the Washington Monthly have all run anti-Giuliani cover stories, with the latter one declaring that, "as president, Giuliani would grab even more executive power than Bush and Cheney."

In the Boston Globe, James Carroll wrote of Giuliani, "He's like a gang leader now, roving the streets, looking for some punk to bash. Iran will do."

This sentiment has dominated liberal blogs, where a general consensus has formed that Giuliani would be the worst president imaginable. Giuliani's decision to include neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz on his foreign policy advisory team has also triggered liberal paranoia about his determination to attack Iran. Lost in all the fuss is the fact that Charles Hill, a Yale professor, is actually Giuliani's top adviser. What Giuliani and Hill have both emphasized is that if America makes it clear that it will not hesitate to use military force, diplomacy has a much more realistic chance of succeeding. Not that this line of reasoning would win over any of his critics on the left.

p>"If you want to spend enormous amounts of money and kill millions of people in service of policies that will be counterproductive for both democracy and American national security then Rudy's your man," wrote the American Prospect 's Scott Lemieux in a post titled "Stop br> Rudy." Giuliani's deviations from conservatives don't score him any points among the Left, either. Lemieux's colleague, Dana Goldstein, pleaded with her fellow progressives to "stop calling Rudy Giuliani pro-choice." /p>

topics:
Foreign Policy, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Military, Iran