Former New York City mayor and early 2008 Republican
presidential frontrunner Rudy Giuliani is back in the spotlight
during the current presidential campaign, acting as a Mitt Romney
surrogate in Florida. Rumored to be working behind-the-scenes on a
new Super PAC with Sheldon Adelson (and thus joining fellow
Republican legends Karl Rove of Crossroads GPS and Dick Armey of
FreedomWorks in the realm of conservative political organizing),
Giuliani has been taking an increasingly public role in the Romney
campaign.
His growing visibility makes sense given the issues at stake in
this election, and raises an important question: Will Rudy Giuliani
speak at this month’s Republican National Convention in Tampa?
Giuliani spoke at Republican Party state headquarters in Tampa
in late July, pumping up a crowd by calling Obama “anti-business,
anti-profit.”
Giuliani has been pitching his protégé Marco Rubio as “the
most exciting” Romney vice-presidential candidate, and
apparently he has enough pull in Romney-world that he can
tell interviewers that Romney will pass immigration reform if
elected president.
“I guarantee you that if we elect Mitt Romney,
our economy next year will boom,” said Giuliani.
During an April appearance on Fox and Friends, Giuliani
defended Romney from charges that the former Massachusetts governor
is not likable enough to win an election against President Obama.
“When I had to be operated on for prostate cancer,” Rudy said, “I
didn’t go to the nicest doctor. I went to the best doctor.”
Giuliani’s forthright manner and fiscal record both fit in with
the recent tone of the Romney campaign.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen delightfully blunt East Coaster John
Sununu straight-talk around the country as a Romney surrogate.
We’ve heard Romney tell Harry Reid to “put up or shut up” about his
tax returns. We’ve watched Romney tout his Bay State spending cuts
and four straight balanced budgets (with an 85 percent Democratic
legislature, no less) in a recent campaign
ad.
As a proponent of “aggressive capitalism” and the first
Republican mayor of New York since liberal John Lindsay, Giuliani
may finally be an unequivocal messaging asset to national
Republican efforts. Or to put it perhaps more accurately, the
Republican establishment may have finally caught up to Rudy.
Properly decorated for his service to New York after 9/11 and
long associated with his aggressive push to stop violent crime,
Giuliani’s fiscal conservatism has often been overlooked by
conservatives who listen to his accent and deem him a RINO. But in
the decade before George W. Bush doubled the size of the federal
budget, Giuliani was pushing through the kind of policies in his
city that conservatives ostensibly built their movement upon.
As he breathlessly
recited in a Fox appearance in January — in which he defended
Romney’s private equity career months before he was a Romney
endorser — Giuliani created 500,000 jobs during his mayoralty, cut
unemployment in half (to 5 percent, one point lower than Romney has
promised for America in his first term), and turned a $2.3 billion
deficit into a surplus.
Did he tell moral conservatives last year to “stay out of
people’s bedrooms”? Sure. But he also thought the Bush tax cuts
“didn’t go far enough” and pointed out the logical companion to tax
cuts, which Bush overlooked: “across-the-board
spending cuts.”
Like his buddy Newt Gingrich, he brought ideas to his
losing presidential run — like retiring 42 percent of federal
employees over a decade to save $20 billion.
As he
told Fox hosts when discussing his decision to lay off 12,000
“political hires” at the New York City Health and Hospital
Corporation: “I was declared to be a monster, a slave driver,
Hitler. I don’t know, all the terrible things. But what did I do? I
took a hospital, I got it to profitability.”
He also made Times Square — an eyesore under Beame, Koch, and
Dinkins — into a monument to profitability. American children knew
it in the '90s as the set of MTV’s TRL — and its studios
and megastores made it seem like the most exciting place in the
world. The area around Washington Square Park? A similar eyesore
until Giuliani made it a
drug-free zone and berthed the corporate wonderland that is the
modern NYU campus. (Meanwhile, Democrat Christine Quinn, presumed
to be next in line for Giuliani’s old job, just wrote a letter on
official City Council letterhead
telling NYU to evict traditional marriage-supporting Chic-fil-A
from campus. Apparently “aggressive capitalism” is not for
everyone.)
Yet, for all his conservatives triumphs, Giuliani ended up in
the final tally a presidential also-ran, that most unappetizing of
Convention speakers (fellow also-ran John McCain’s reported Tampa
snub, and the
ensuing controversy around it, don’t exactly bode well for
Rudy’s speaking chances).
2008 simply was not Rudy’s year. His campaign manager Mike
DuHaime famously bypassed Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina
and targeted the Florida primary —erasing Rudy’s name from the
first rounds of media coverage and causing him a third-place finish
in Florida on January 29. That Giuliani could run on a promise of
tax reform and a record of 23 tax cuts and still not trust early
primary voters to look past his pro-choice beliefs signaled either
a massive strategy mistake on the part of his campaign or a
frustrating reality of the Republican nominating process. At
different times over the past four years, Giuliani has
blamed both.
Even if he had won the nomination, the financial collapse in
September —blamed on the white-collar folks from Rudy’s own neck
of the woods — would have sunk him even more drastically than it
did McCain. As
Bill Clinton told Esquire, “on September 15, when
Lehman Brothers failed, the race was over. The only presidential
election in my lifetime I think that ended before the first Tuesday
after the first Monday in November.”
With his firm Giuliani Partners overlooking Times Square and his
other firm Bracewell and Giuliani located on the 49th floor of
a Sixth Avenue office tower near Bank of America, Rudy would have
had a tough time stealing voters away from the “nicest doctor” in
that race.
But 2012 is a much different election.
In May 2011, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found
Giuliani
leading the field of possible Republican candidates, ahead of
Romney and Sarah Palin. America’s mayor voiced his admiration for
McCain’s traditional 2008 primary strategy and set off for a week
of events in New Hampshire. He installed a New Hampshire-based
spokeswoman and earned the stated
confidence of a former New Hampshire Republican chairman.
Potential New Hampshire primary voters popped up in mainstream news
articles calling him an “amazing
gentleman.”
The 2010 Tea Party Revolution — in which Rudy played kingmaker
for young icon Marco Rubio and first-time House winners Richard
Hanna and Nan Hayworth, among others — had seemingly done for the
former mayor what the 1966 midterms did for Nixon. In opposition to
an unpopular president, Rudy had set himself up for a comeback.
Of course, it was a comeback squashed by circumstance. When
Rudy’s friend Rick Perry entered the race on August 13, the Texas
governor instantly
took an 11-point lead over Romney in a Rasmussen poll. Florida
Republicans were treating Perry
like an inevitability as late as mid-September.
Giuliani gave up
hope, dropping into the pool of running-mate candidates
alongside fresher-faced East Coast dynamo (and confirmed convention
speaker) Chris Christie. “I’m a realist, and I understand how the
primary system works,” Giuliani sighed.
But for all of Rudy’s self-deprecation, the Republican primary
process this year yielded a high-earning blue-state governor
pitching what our president calls “top-down economics.”
Faced with an opponent who doesn’t think business owners built
their own companies, Republicans may want to hand Rudy a microphone
at their convention.
“People
who live in freedom always prevail over people who live in
oppression. That’s the — that’s the story of the Old Testament.
That’s the story of World War II and the cold war. That’s the story
of the firefighters and police officers and rescue workers who
courageously saved thousands of lives on Sept. 11, 2001,” Giuliani
said in a moving speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention
in New York.
No, Rudy Giuliani will never be president of the United States.
But this year, he might still win in Florida.
