MANCHESTER, N.H. — In this state on January 8, Rudy Giuliani
will face an early test of whether he can translate his national
celebrity status into a winning presidential campaign.
Over the weekend, Giuliani took his first bus tour through the
state, and the results were mixed, providing fodder for both his
skeptics and supporters. On Saturday, he appeared outside City Hall
in Manchester to receive the endorsement of Mayor Frank Guinta. The
crowd was sparse, and the number of people who crashed the event
waving Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul signs rivaled the number who
had come to support Giuliani. But later that evening, as he
strolled down Main Street in Nashua, he was treated like a star,
posing for pictures and signing autographs, with people calling to
him affectionately as “Rudy,” and even occasionally wrapping their
arms around him in bear hugs.
Speaking to TAS and two other reporters on Sunday, as
his bus traveled from Hudson to Windham, Giuliani was asked how
much of his viability as a candidate is rooted in the connection
people have to him as a result of his leadership in the wake of the
Sept. 11 attacks.
“That might be the thing that gets people to pay attention to
me, but I would like them to look at my whole record,” Giuliani
said, recounting his successes as a mob prosecutor and
crime-fighting mayor that preceded the attacks on the World Trade
Center. “If people look to Sept. 11 as they have a right to and
should, and they think I made the right decisions then, it didn’t
happen in a vacuum. It happened after years and years of experience
in dealing with different situations and crises.”
As the primary season enters its final stretch, Giuliani is
attempting to contrast himself with rivals by pointing to the
results he was able to get in New York City, and predicting that he
could have similar successes at the national level. “Ending illegal
immigration is a heck of a job. Nobody’s ever done it,” he said. “I
know I can do it. I know that the same way I knew I could reduce
welfare and dramatically reduce crime….If people want a president
that can get things done, that’s what I do.”
THOUGH GIULIANI HAS A DOUBLE-DIGIT LEAD in national polls and in
large states such as Florida and California, he trails Mitt Romney
in Iowa as well as here in New Hampshire. Over the weekend,
Giuliani sharpened his attacks on the former Massachusetts
governor, arguing onboard the bus that “frankly, [Romney] didn’t
get results.”
“He was not one of the outstanding governors,” Giuliani said.
“George Will said, when I was mayor of New York, I ran the most
successful conservative government in the last 50 or 60 years.
Nobody would say that about Mitt Romney. The one thing he’s known
for is health care. And the health care [program] is the thing he’s
abandoned in the rest of the country because he had to contain a
very big mistake, which he realizes is a bad mistake, a mandate —
a mandate which is enforceable by a tax.”
Giuliani went on to criticize Romney’s record on law and order
issues. “He had a poor record on crime,” Giuliani said. “Violent
crime went up, murder went up while he was governor. In both of
those categories [in New York City], we had historic
decreases.”
Giuliani continued, “In the area of fiscal management, he tried
to bring about tax cuts, he failed to do it. I tried to bring about
tax cuts, I succeeded in doing it….So I think there’s a
difference between a guy who gets results, real results, that were
applauded nationwide, and somebody who had a mixed record, at best,
as governor.”
In addition to taking aim at Romney’s record, he also blasted
his rival’s campaign style.
“Governor Romney has kind of a propensity to be in a glass
house,” Giuliani said. “He throws stones at people, then on that
issue, he normally has a worse record than whoever he is throwing
stones at.”
SHOULD GIULIANI GAIN the Republican nomination, his Democratic
rival will likely attempt to portray him as a man with an
authoritarian streak who was an overzealous prosecutor and had a
robust view of executive power as mayor. During the interview,
Giuliani was asked to respond to two of the most common criticisms
along these lines — that he used “perp walks” as prosecutor to
parade indicted men before the media and that he attempted to
extend his final term as mayor in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks.
“I didn’t try to extend my term,” Giuliani said flatly. “Other
people suggested that, and I turned it down, said we shouldn’t.” He
noted that he cut an endorsement commercial for his successor,
Michael Bloomberg.
He also defended his record as prosecutor. “Who decides whether
people’s rights are violated?” Giuliani asked rhetorically.
“Courts. I had something like 4,000-5,000 cases held up on appeal,
and something like 26 reversed. That’s about as good a record as
any prosecutor can have.”
Giuliani went on, “Sure, I’d be accused sometimes of going too
far, but then when it got looked at by a court, in a dispassionate
light of day, most of the times they concluded that I was acting
fairly, impartially, and convictions were correct convictions.”
Asked how he would rally a war-weary nation around his
commitment to remain “on offense” against terrorism, Giuliani
rejected the premise of the question. “I think the mood of the
country has subtly changed somewhat and it’s going to be somewhere
different six months from now.” Giuliani remains committed to
keeping troops in Iraq, but he said going forward, the major issue
will be Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“The use of the military option against Iran is something that
we should avoid, it’s something that should be the last option,”
Giuliani said. “It’s something that we should realize would be very
dangerous, and difficult. But a nuclear Iran would be more
difficult, more dangerous, long-term more destabilizing for us and
the entire world.”
He rejected the arguments of those who compare a nuclear Iran to
the former Soviet Union.
“There are people who believe that we can live with a nuclear
Iran,” Giuliani said. “There are people who believe that
containment might work. There are people who believe you could use
the model of the Cold War….I believe they are fundamentally wrong
in that calculation. I think Iran is very different than the
Soviets were during the Cold War. Iran is very different than even
North Korea. Iran has imperial ambitions, Iran has used language of
attack against Israel and the United States. They’ve sort of told
us their ambitions if they become nuclear. Iran is an unstable
regime. It is an irrational regime, it is controlled by the mullahs
and by a theocracy.”
The latest CNN/WMUR poll had Giuliani slipping into third place
in New Hampshire, 17 points behind Romney and slightly trailing
John McCain. The silver lining for Giuliani was that only 14
percent of those polled said they were definitely decided on a
candidate, meaning that the former mayor still has an opening.
Within the last two weeks, Giuliani has taken out his first
television ads here, which, along with the bus tour, suggests he
plans to compete seriously in the state. He has six weeks to get
results.
Philip Klein is a reporter for The American
Spectator.
