It's hard to imagine a better Republican candidate for president of the United States than Rudolph Giuliani. He's one of the most popular politicians in America—a hero twice over, once for cleaning up New York when it seemed like an ungovernable city, and then for stewarding that city through the greatest crisis it's faced since the British army came calling in 1776. He's been Time's person of the year, written a bestselling book on leadership, and earned the title of "America's mayor" from an admiring national media. He has a reputation for competence, tough-mindedness and cleaning up other people's mess, which makes him an ideal successor to George W Bush. In a divided country, he's one of the few big figures with bi-partisan appeal, and one of the few politicians who seems capable of breaking the 50-50 deadlock that's defined US politics for a decade or more.
It's also hard to imagine a more unlikely Republican candidate than Giuliani. He's a pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage northeastern politician running for the nomination of a party that's spent decades chewing up socially liberal northeastern politicians. He's never held any office higher than big-city mayor (no politician has ever made the jump from City Hall to the White House). His personal life—the two divorces, the public extramarital affairs, the estrangement from his children—makes Bill Clinton look like a 1950s sitcom dad. He's famously touchy, abrasive, arrogant—famously New York, in other words, in a country that loves its most famous city but also loves to hate it. And even in Gotham itself he is widely disliked, often by the people who have worked most closely with him. (Most recently he was attacked by Jerome Hauer, his former top anti-terrorism aide, who described him as a "control freak" and said he would make "a terrible president.") Giuliani is far less popular in the city he once ruled than his less controversial successor, Michael Bloomberg; the New York reporters who used to cover him think he's slightly unhinged; and he's unlikely to carry his home state in a presidential contest with any Democratic nominee.
Until Giuliani entered the race in February, it was widely assumed that the second Rudy—the social liberal, the philanderer, the asshole—would keep the first from ascending to the presidency, and might even keep him from running entirely. Why would a man who had spent the last five years being lionised (and paid $100,000 per speech) risk having his reputation dragged through the dirt of the Republican primary campaign? Giuliani had bowed out of a New York Senate race against Hillary Clinton in 2000 in part because of prostate cancer—but also, it was speculated, because he lacked the appetite to run a race he knew he might lose. Why should a presidential election prove any different?
Seven months into the Giuliani campaign—seven months that he's spent atop almost every national poll of GOP voters, having surged past the presumptive frontrunner, John McCain, and having kept the new kid on the block, Fred Thompson (see below) at bay—it's hard to imagine how anyone ever doubted that Rudy would run. The idea that the comforts of the lecture circuit might have leeched away his will to power seems silly. Certainly not in 2008, in a country looking for wartime leadership, in a party devastated by the last midterm elections, in a field without a shoo-in candidate. Rudy, content to rest on his laurels? Rudy, anything but vaultingly ambitious? Never.
Giuliani later said of his inclination towards the priesthood that the vow of celibacy seemed like too great a cross to bear, but the vows of poverty and obedience would have been equally burdensome, given the scale of his ambition. This was apparent from the start. "He looked like a little man, not a student, like he was dressed to go to IBM," a high school friend told the journalist Paul Schwartzman years later. His college girlfriend recalls him reciting the words "Rudolph… William… Louis… Giuliani… The Third… The first Italian-Catholic president of the United States" to her, as if introducing himself at some future state dinner.
After college and law school, he took a job as a federal prosecutor, where he spent the next 15 years making a name for himself on high-profile cases. His most famous coup was the Mafia commission trial of 1985 and 1986, in which the son of a loan shark's enforcer indicted the heads of New York's "five families," and brought eight convictions in what an admiring press described as "the case of cases."
He made enemies, particularly on Wall Street, but to most New Yorkers, Giuliani was a folk hero—a potential saviour for a city coping with massive debts, sky-high crime rates, an unresponsive bureaucracy and a political process held hostage by activists eager to fan the flames of racial grievance.
New York had been viewed as ungovernable since the 1960s, and the mayor's office—whether occupied by the matinée-idol patrician John Lindsey, the blue-collar scrapper Ed Koch or the African-American David Dinkins—seemed powerless to halt the slide. Decay was visible everywhere: in the murder rate and the epidemic of homelessness; in the swollen welfare rolls; the needles in the parks and the "squeegee men" bullying motorists into paying them to wash their car windows. Worse, many of the people in charge were paralysed by the ghosts of racism past, with attempts to tackle the underclass's criminality and welfare dependency often dismissed as "blaming the victim."
In this environment, Giuliani's opening was clear. But to be a plausible mayoral candidate in a city where Democrats enjoyed a 5-1 advantage in voter registration, he needed to broaden his appeal. He was a prototypical "Reagan Democrat"—a white ethnic whose parents had voted for Roosevelt, but who had turned rightwards during the 1970s, a decade when liberalism seemed to be driving the country into a ditch. (Giuliani voted for George McGovern in 1972; ten years later, he was working in the Reagan justice department.) But winning over New York's Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar voters in the outer boroughs, wouldn't win him the mayoralty. He needed to win over moderately liberal Manhattanites as well—voters who might be fed up with Democratic misrule but who were unlikely to turn their city over to a hard-edged conservative. To accomplish this, he needed to recast himself as less of a Reagan Democrat and more of a "Rockefeller Republican," the breed of socially liberal, fiscally conservative politicians who took their name from Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor, vice-president and repeated presidential also-ran.
So Giuliani embarked on the balancing act that would define his political career. Running for mayor in 1989, he played up his tough-on-crime bona fides but moved leftwards on abortion and gay rights—as mayor, he would later back public funding for abortions and sign one of the country's first significant domestic-partnership bills—making himself more acceptable to Manhattanites. While running as a Republican, he also accepted the nomination of New York's small but influential Liberal party, which explained that Giuliani "agreed with the Liberal party's views on affirmative action, gay rights, gun control, school prayer, and tuition tax credits." Facing off against David Dinkins in the main contest, he cast himself as a competent manager rather than a conservative ideologue. He was still the outer-borough Catholic scrapper, the foe of "the violent criminals on our streets and the white-collar criminals in their office suites," as he put it—but suddenly he was also the heir of Nelson Rockefeller.
It was a trick few politicians could have pulled off, but Giuliani managed it: he successfully married two conflicting American political types into a single persona. On selected hot-button national issues, from abortion to gun control to immigration, he would be liberal enough to make liberals feel comfortable voting for him. But on the issues that mattered the most to New York City—taxes and spending, crime and welfare—he would be a Reagan Democrat, taking on an out-of-touch bureaucracy that coddled deadbeats, excused criminals and prayed for the federal government to bail out its finances. Like the city he aspired to rule, he would contain multitudes.
Giuliani lost to Dinkins in the 1989 race, but came closer than any Republican had a right to, and four years later, with the city mired in a recession and the mayor's office wallowing in self-pity, he won the rematch and swept into City Hall. He wasn't quite "the first Italian-Catholic president of the United States," but he had won what many consider the second most powerful elected office in America.
What happened next is a familiar story, not least because Giuliani has never ceased telling it. How he and his police commissioner, William Bratton, introduced new crime-fighting methods, including an aggressive "broken windows" crackdown on minor offences that aimed to restore a sense of order to the city, and a computerised system called Compstat that allowed for better analysis of crime patterns and police performance. How he went to war with corrupt institutions—like the city's Fulton Fish Market, where the mafia still held sway—and racial agitators like Al Sharpton who threatened to make the city's black neighbourhoods rise up against his policies. How crime fell, and fell, to levels not seen since the 1960s. How an economic revival filled the city's coffers. How New York became liveable again: the porn shops disappeared from Times Square, the squeegee men were routed, the parks became safe at night. How Giuliani was re-elected in 1997—after having beaten Dinkins four years earlier by only 50,000 votes—with 57 per cent of the vote. How people began to speak of him as a possible president.
Rudy's critics were legion, of course. They pointed out that some of the reforms began under Dinkins; they argued that Bratton, who was forced out when Giuliani's ego wouldn't brook a rival, deserved more credit for the drop in crime than did the mayor; and they suggested that Gotham's recovery had more to do with the nationwide economic boom than anything Rudy's City Hall had done. But these claims failed to impress New York voters, who had lived in the pre-Rudy city and knew what a difference he had made.
The second-term Giuliani, though, would prove to be rather closer to his critics' caricature. His efforts to reform the city's schools came to little; test scores fell, even as the rest of New York's social indicators were improving. Tough policing continued to bring the crime rate down, but as the city became safer, this aggressive policing courted backlash, particularly among minorities. There were several incidents in which policemen killed unarmed men, and Giuliani handled them badly, taking his usual pro-police bias further than public opinion would accept.
Meanwhile, he picked a series of small and pointless fights that suggested an authoritarian streak. He tried (and failed) to crack down on jaywalking; tried (and failed) to prevent the Brooklyn Museum from displaying a Chris Ofili painting of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung; tried (and failed) to prevent city buses from running advertisements touting New York magazine as "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." His personal life intruded into his governance; he conducted a semi-public affair with Judi Nathan, a sales manager for a pharmaceutical company, and when the story broke, he called a press conference to announce that he was separating from his second wife, Donna Hanover—which turned out to be the first she had heard of it. At roughly the same time, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and dropped out of his much-anticipated Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton. He had won the war for New York, but like many wartime leaders he seemed ill-equipped to govern the peace, and the window for a career in national politics appeared to be closing.
But then came 11th September 2001. New Yorkers had tired of the bad Rudy, but the rest of America barely knew him, and with the country in crisis the national public enjoyed its first major exposure to the good Rudy—the courageous, take-charge mayor. For most of the country, New York magazine's Stephen Rodrick noted recently, 9/11 was "a distant televised drama… equal parts Pearl Harbour and resurrection." And Rudy was its hero.
Nothing that's happened since has shaken this perception; indeed, the slew of recent debacles, from the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina, has only reinforced the public's view of Rudy as the kind of leader you need in a crisis. Giuliani endorsed Bush and campaigned with him in 2004, but hasn't been tied to any of his failures; he remains a figure apart, a man on a white horse somehow beyond everyday politics.
For his New York piece on Rudy's presidential aspirations, Rodrick interviewed Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's former campaign manager, who described running a Democratic focus group for the 2005 Los Angeles mayoral race: "We were asking what they were looking for in a leader," Trippi says. "One guy said, 'Why can't we have someone like Rudy?' Then everyone joined in, saying, 'Yeah, we need a Rudy.'"
Will Giuliani's campaign unravel as his positions and his record come under scrutiny? The left-wing Village Voice recently ran an attack on Giuliani's "five big lies about 9/11," accusing him of "spreading smoke and ashes about his lousy record." Meanwhile, many conservatives have echoed Kate O'Beirne's assessment in the National Review that once primary voters are acquainted with Giuliani's Rockefeller Republican tendencies on issues from abortion to immigration to gun control, they "will not only back other candidates but mobilise against him."
That calculation may prove correct, but the anti-Giuliani mobilisation hasn't happened yet. Giuliani's lead in the polls shrank somewhat after he joined the race, possibly the result of his fumbling attempts to finesse his abortion position in the Republican debates. But he's still viewed favourably by 72 per cent of Republicans, and he polls better than any of his rivals in head-to-head match-ups (see box, p55). Moreover, he's running at a time when just 9 per cent of GOP primary voters cite abortion, gay marriage or "moral values" as the most important issue facing their party. Fifty-five per cent, by contrast, cite the Iraq war, terrorism and national security. Giuliani doesn't have much foreign policy experience, of course, but he does have 9/11—and he believes he can ride it all the way to the White House.
For this to succeed, the Reagan Democrat/Rockefeller Republican double act will have to work one more time. Giuliani's hawkish rhetoric on Iraq and terrorism—he has just proposed ID cards for all foreign visitors—will need to win over socially conservative voters who might otherwise be turned off by his cultural liberalism, while his fiscal conservatism and distance from the religious right will need to win over moderates in states like Connecticut and California, where the GOP has been losing ground.
But the kind of hawkishness Giuliani needs to cover over his heterodoxies in the Republican primary campaign may doom him in a general election. Republican voters are looking for a candidate who can win the war in Iraq, which is why Giuliani's tough-guy persona plays so well with them—as does his warning, in a recent Foreign Affairs essay, that "the consequences of abandoning Iraq" short of victory would be worse than the defeat in Vietnam. Independent voters, though, are looking for a candidate who can end the Iraq war, which may make a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama seem a better foreign policy option than the bellicose ex-mayor.
Without the usual Republican edge in foreign policy, Giuliani risks losing votes among the working-class swing voters who helped put George W Bush in the White House. Bush succeeded in wooing these voters not only by playing the terrorism card, but by blurring the distinctions with the Democrats on health, education and poverty. Giuliani, by contrast, has preached a straightforward free-market line on most domestic issues. This approach resonated with blue-collar voters in the Reagan era, when they felt overtaxed by a government that seemed to care more about coddling criminals and paying off welfare deadbeats. But with taxes low, crime down and the welfare system overhauled, it's easy to imagine Giuliani losing the working-class vote to a populist Democrat eager to talk about kitchen-table concerns.
The US media, which tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, love the idea of a candidate who fits that niche. But there aren't enough votes there to win the presidency—as Andrew Ferguson noted recently in the Weekly Standard, it's quite possible that "rather than appeal to the 'centre'… Giuliani's social liberalism will offend conservatives and his fiscal conservatism will offend liberals."
But he has his personal bond with the country as collateral, and his winner's touch—and America loves a winner more than it does a poll-tested set of positions. And he has something else as well: the eye for the main chance, the killer instinct that sets great politicians apart from the merely good.
This showed up midway through the second televised Republican debate in May. With ten candidates jostling for time and attention, the antiwar congressman Ron Paul suggested that it was America's involvement in the middle east that had provoked the attacks on the World Trade Centre. "We've been bombing Iraq for ten years," he noted. "They attack us because we've been over there."
Most of the candidates seemed content to ignore Paul, who polls about 1 per cent in most primary surveys. Only Giuliani saw an opportunity, and stepped into the breach. "May I make a comment on that?" he asked the moderator, and then went on: "That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11."
It wasn't exactly what Paul said, of course, and the idea that Rudy had never heard of the concept of blowback was implausible. But it didn't matter: the hall erupted in an ovation, and though the debate had 20 minutes yet to run, Giuliani had won it.
