ST. PAUL — Less than a year ago, Rudy Giuliani was leading in
national polls for the Republican presidential nomination, but last
night, he was making the case for the man who was in a distant
third place at the time — John McCain.
When we last saw Giuliani on the national scene, his supposed
“firewall” in Florida had collapsed, forcing him to abandon his
once promising run for the White House. But tonight, he brought the
house down with a prosecutorial dissection of Barack Obama’s
unreadiness to be president by contrasting his lack of record with
the experience of McCain.
Liberated from the burden of trying to convince reluctant
conservatives to get behind his candidacy, Giuliani was at his
best, using mockery to expose Obama’s vulnerabilities.
“He worked as a community organizer,” Giuliani said to chuckles,
“and immersed himself in Chicago machine politics. Then he ran for
the state legislature — where nearly 130 times he was unable to
make a decision yes or no. He simply voted ‘present.’ As Mayor of
New York City, I never got a chance to vote ‘present.’ And you
know, when you’re President of the United States, you can’t just
vote ‘present.’ You must make decisions.”
He said, “Barack Obama has never led anything,” adding for
effect, “Nothing. Nada.”
He also riffed off of Obama’s favorite slogans by noting that
“[c]hange is not a destination, just as hope is not a
strategy.”
The parade also featured a several of this year’s other
also-rans, with Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney preceding Giuliani on
stage.
Huckabee and Romney had different tasks. While Giuliani is
unlikely to seek the presidency again given that this was the best
shot he had at the Republican nomination, Huckabee and Romney are
likely to extend their bitter rivalry into the next open election
cycle.
If he’s to have any appeal beyond the strong support he enjoys
from the evangelical base, Huckabee will have to come across as
more mainstream and win over skeptical economic and national
security conservatives, which will not be an easy task.
He picked up where he left off in the primaries, in which he
appealed to blue collar workers, by speaking of families struggling
to pay gas prices and keep their homes and his own working class
upbringing.
In a nod to limited government conservatives, Huckabee said
that, “John McCain doesn’t want the kind of change that allows the
government to reach deeper into your paycheck and pick your doctor,
your child’s school, or even the kind of car you drive or how much
you inflate the tires.”
He also flashed his sense of humor, saying that Sarah Palin,
“got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden
got running for President of the United States.”
During his pugnacious speech, Romney declared, “We need change
all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative
Washington!” He blasted “timid, liberal empty gestures” with regard
to Russia and China and jibed, “I have one more recommendation for
energy conservation — let’s keep Al Gore’s private jet on the
ground.”
But his speech was also a continuation of his case in the
primaries that he was the candidate who best represented the
three-legged stool of social, economic, and national security
conservatives.
“America cannot long lead the family of nations if we fail the
family here at home,” he said.
Speaking as a successful businessman, he said that, “America is
strong because of the ingenuity and entrepreneurship and hard work
of the American people.”
He also blasted liberals for failing to recognize “the threat
from radical, violent Jihad.”
Romney will have a lot going for him the next time around. He’ll
begin with much stronger name recognition, have more years of
distance from his numerous policy flip flops, and he’ll benefit
from the Republican tendency to nominate the candidate whose turn
it is.
But if the reaction to last night’s speeches inside the Xcel
Energy Center is any indication, both Huckabee and Romney will have
their work cut out for them the next time around. It seems that the
Republican Party has found a favorite daughter in their newly
minted vice-presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
