Razzle Dazzle
Character Took Down Rudy

By RICHARD STEIER

The notion that character is fate doesn't always hold up in presidential politics, but it's as good an explanation as any for Rudy Giuliani's political demise in the Florida Republican primary Jan. 29.

This was the place our former Mayor chose to dig in and fight after concluding he couldn't win in New Hampshire and abandoning that bellwether state before its primary three weeks earlier. By his reckoning, Florida would give him the momentum that could catapult him to victory in most of the big states holding primaries on Super Tuesday Feb. 5 and secure the Republican nomination.

The man who a year ago led by 25 points in national polls for the GOP nomination cast himself as the surging underdog in the mold of the Giants after they qualified for the Super Bowl against the mighty New England Patriots.

Kept Fading Once Caught

The tracking polls for Florida in the week leading up to the primary suggested another sports analogy, however: a horse who had grabbed a big early lead as the heavy betting favorite but had been passed by two others turning for home and would be lucky to bail out the show-bettors.

WHEELS FELL OFF THE MYTH: Rudy Giuliani's lackluster finishes in the two states where he campaigned most, New Hampshire and Florida, suggested that the better people got to know him, the less they wanted to vote for him.

Mr. Giuliani started that final week running on average two or three points behind John McCain and Mitt Romney; by that Friday the deficit had roughly doubled. The weekend brought even worse news: eight different polls that were concluded in the two days before the primary showed him trailing Mr. McCain by at least 10 and as many as 22 points, one point more than he eventually lost by. Mr. Giuliani's negative momentum was so strong that if the Florida campaign had lasted another couple of weeks, he might have had to struggle to hold fourth place over Ron Paul.

His slide was a reminder that despite being elected Mayor twice, Mr. Giuliani has never been a particularly good campaigner. At one point early in the 1989 race - reminiscent of his huge lead at this time a year ago - polls showed him more than 30 points ahead of David Dinkins, who would eventually defeat Mayor Ed Koch in the Democratic Primary and then squeak past Mr. Giuliani in November.

Four years later, when Mr. Dinkins's mix of indecisiveness and bad luck had made him a clearly vulnerable incumbent, Mr. Giuliani needed a referendum on Staten Island seceding from the city to bring out enough voters from a key stronghold to provide the narrow margin that elected him Mayor. In 1997, a good first term and the support of many labor unions that were fearful that backing his opponent could lead to political retaliation gave him considerable advantages over challenger Ruth Messinger, and her own questionable campaign strategy abetted him in his one easy win.

Before he dropped out of the 2000 Senate race against Hillary Clinton, his seeming lack of enthusiasm for the campaign - symbolized by his canceling one key upstate appearance to attend the Yankees' home opener - and his decision to bring his personal life front and center by announcing at a press conference that he was leaving his wife were indications that he thought his name and image should overcome his political gaffes large and small.

That inattentiveness to the nuts and bolts of getting elected caught up with him this year, said Maureen Connelly, a political consultant who worked on Mr. Giuliani's 1989 general election campaign once her old boss, Mr. Koch, was out of the race.

'America's Mayor' Bubble Burst

"For five or six years, he was encased in the 'America's Mayor' bubble - he could do no wrong," she said. "He forgot that the bubble could burst. He also surrounded himself with his old City Hall staff and did not build a national network. And when he went outside, he had two campaign officials who had to resign because of various misdeeds," referring to one official with a drug problem and another who was discovered to have patronized a brothel. "It was like Bernie Kerik all over again with the lack of vetting of the people who work for you."

There were political factors that worked against Mr. Giuliani, not the least of them the wide gulf between the ideological positions that can make a candidate electable as Mayor of New York City and those that have sufficient appeal to capture the Republican nomination for President.

Even so, said veteran political consultant George Arzt, "You can't say that it was inevitable" that Mr. Giuliani's campaign fizzled out as it did.

"He made what I think were some terrible strategic errors by not going into the early primaries," he said. "Everyone in this business knows that momentum is the name of this game. People make mistakes all the time in campaigns, but you can't afford a series of them."

Mr. Giuliani never believed he could win the Iowa caucuses because of his past support of abortion, and apparently concluded after mounting an effort in New Hampshire that he could not win there, leading him to desert the state and focus all his energies on Florida rather than battling on, as Mr. McCain did to revive his campaign by defeating the favored Mr. Romney.

Mr. Arzt said the result of this disinterest - Mr. Giuliani lagging at the rear of the pack with Mr. Paul - raised doubts about his ability to prevail in Florida once the two front-runners focused their attention there.

'Gotta Show You Care'

"You've gotta show that you care about Iowa, you've gotta show that you care about New Hampshire," he said.

"Could he have won?" Mr. Arzt continued. "Yes. But he had no traction once he didn't compete in those early states."

His task was complicated, he noted, by Mr. Giuliani's pronounced shifts on matters like gun control and immigration since his days as Mayor, and the more-nuanced but equally charged turn in his position on abortion.

"He had a vulnerability [among Republicans] from the beginning based on his original positions," Mr. Arzt said, and there had not been a gradual evolution over the years in Mr. Giuliani's views on those matters that would allow him to explain that his shifts were based on experience. "There was no one sure that he really stood for anything once you start moving so abruptly."

Romney Paid Lesser Price

Yet Mr. Romney has made even more-dramatic reversals in all those areas, and while it has hurt him to some degree against Mr. McCain - who risked being out of step with his party with his less-harsh stance on immigration and his unequivocal opposition to the use of torture by military personnel to obtain information from terrorists or other war prisoners - his prospects haven't been crippled as Mr. Giuliani's were.

The most-obvious explanation, aside from Mr. Romney's using considerable sums of his own money to keep his campaign viable while Rudy kept his hands in his pockets and staffers went unpaid for a couple of weeks, was that Mr. Giuliani's messy personal and professional lives finally caught up with him.

What was perhaps so shocking was that the man who constantly talked of the need for the nation to be on the offensive against the terrorist threat had no real answers once the land mines of his past began exploding.

It is often said that Mr. Giuliani inspires intense loyalty among those who are in his inner circle. It is no coincidence that he and his aides made viewing "The Godfather" into a cult experience: the Academy Award-winning movie inspired by Mario Puzo's novel is a celebration of the fierce fellowship extended to those who keep the faith within the Corleone Family.

Long List of Injured

But Mr. Giuliani's sometimes-brutal style of governing left behind a long trail of those infuriated or revulsed by the extent to which he and his aides would go to punish those who bucked him.

Seven days before the Florida primary, the New York Times published an article detailing some of the harsher and pettier examples of Mr. Giuliani's brand of score-settling. One Rudy loyalist lamented on the day it appeared that it made the former Mayor appear vindictive and vicious, and questioned the timing of the piece, noting that each of the eight anecdotes - virtually all of which had appeared in print previously - concerned actions taken at least seven years earlier, while he was still in office. He did not, however, dispute the basic facts in the piece.

Smeared to Muddy Waters

One recurring theme in the article was the lengths to which the Mayor and his staff went to keep those they considered disloyal from finding jobs elsewhere. In one case, an innocent bystander who was taken hostage by Rudy's forces was left dangling in employment limbo for more than a year because an aide to Mr. Giuliani tried to continue the smear long after it had served the Mayor's short-term needs.

That was Richard Murphy, who had been the city's Youth Services Commissioner under Mayor Dinkins. His only crime was having preceded Mr. Giuliani's choice for the job, John Brandon, who in May 1994 - less than five months into Rudy's first term - was discovered to have a problem concerning unpaid taxes. In an attempt to limit the damage in the next day's papers, at 7 p.m. that evening Mr. Giuliani's Press Secretary, Cristyne Lategano, entered the reporters' room at City Hall to peddle the claims that Mr. Murphy had exceeded his budget by $11 million, that funds had been improperly diverted to groups assisting in Mr. Dinkins's unsuccessful 1993 re-election campaign, and that the agency's computers had been broken into and files tampered with in an attempt to cover up the crime.

Most of the reporters, already past their deadlines, without verifying the allegations filed substitute stories balancing Mr. Brandon's tax problems with the allegations about Mr. Murphy's stewardship of the agency. The one exception was Michael Powell, then Newsday's City Hall bureau chief, who was skeptical about the timing of the claim and made only a passing mention of it. (Mr. Powell, who now works for the Times, was one of the authors of the Jan. 22 story about Mr. Giuliani's vindictiveness.)

Lategano's Load of Bull

It turned out his skepticism was well-founded. Ten months after the allegations made by Ms. Lategano prompted a probe, the Department of Investigation, which had its independence thoroughly compromised throughout Mr. Giuliani's eight years in office, issued a report stating that there had been no improper diversion of funds and that Mr. Murphy had gone only $4 million over budget. Even this marked-down overspending was challenged by then-City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, whose office contended that Mr. Murphy had left behind a budget surplus.

Were there consequences for the smear? Not for Ms. Lategano, who was widely believed - most prominently by Mr. Giuliani's wife at the time, Donna Hanover - to be the Mayor's mistress. Mr. Murphy took a different kind of screwing: the Times reported that after an unidentified West Coast foundation asked him to replicate the Beacon Schools which remained open for youth programs at night that he had created here - which Mr. Giuliani himself had expressed admiration for - a call from an unnamed senior Giuliani official to the foundation led to the job offer being withdrawn.

"He goes to people and makes them complicit in his revenge," Mr. Murphy said.

Even those who earned Mr. Giuliani's loyalty through years of service or friendship could become vulnerable. Just as Ms. Lategano was said to have undermined aides who had histories with Rudy that predated his mayoralty by whispering that they were not sufficiently loyal, new wife Judi Nathan-Giuliani was capable of stirring Mr. Giuliani's more-arbitrary side.

Exiled From Kingdom

Another piece in The Times the week before the primary noted the help that Mr. McCain was getting in navigating Florida's large Cuban community from Manny Papir, a former Giuliani aide who began working for Rudy during the 1993 campaign and became his Deputy Chief of Staff. After the Mayor left office at the beginning of 2002, Mr. Papir joined his consulting firm at a reported salary of $200,000 a year. He was traveling with the couple on a European tour during which Mr. Giuliani was knighted by Queen Elizabeth when one of Ms. Nathan-Giuliani's demands exasperated Mr. Papir sufficiently that he referred to her as "Princess." Word got back to Judi, who took the matter to Rudy, who fired his longtime aide and left him to find his own way home from Germany, where America's Mayor was about to receive another prize.

One of the surprising aspects of the Times article about Mr. Papir's work for Mr. McCain - which clearly paid dividends in his handy win among Latino voters, according to exit polls from the Florida primary - was that a week earlier the New York Post had reported that Mr. Papir had been retained on a month-to-month contract by Giuliani Partners. Maybe Rudy, six years later, was trying to make up for the unceremonious dumping; perhaps it had occurred to him even before he dropped out of the race that it couldn't hurt to re-establish ties with someone who could be a liaison with Mr. McCain for future business dealings that might benefit his consulting firm should the Arizona Senator become President.

The Judi Mistakes

But the intrigue was also another reminder of the liabilities his third wife, with a style that one Rudy admirer labeled "socially inappropriate," has sometimes presented for him.

Mr. Arzt said even when Mr. Giuliani was riding high in the polls, his talking about his wife as a potential cabinet adviser had shined an unwelcome spotlight upon her. "The focus on Judi and having her out there in the first place was, I think, a mistake," he said. And whether her phone call to Mr. Giuliani while he was addressing the National Rifle Association was his idea to orchestrate the media coverage of his appearance or her own impulse, it was another instance in which his relationship with his wife raised eyebrows, Mr. Arzt said. "That's a New York schtick," he said, that wouldn't figure to go over well with a powerful group that expected to be taken seriously.

All those incidents merely served as prelude for the problems Mr. Giuliani encountered when Ben Smith reported on politico.com that NYPD bodyguards had been assigned to Ms. Nathan nearly a year before it was revealed in the spring of 2000 that she and Mr. Giuliani were having an affair.

The ex-Mayor was able to raise questions about the report's suggestion that the overtime for the Detectives had been paid from the budgets of obscure city agencies rather than the NYPD to conceal the relationship, but the issue of which entity paid wasn't the most damaging aspect for him. Rather, the story placed under a national spotlight, at a time when the electorate was beginning to focus, the nasty divorce Mr. Giuliani had from Ms. Hanover, and offered those who didn't know the circumstances an understanding as to why neither of his children from that marriage was supporting his campaign.

Burned by Bernie

Less than three weeks before that, Mr. Kerik had been indicted by the Federal Government for matters including tax evasion and accepting more than a quarter-million dollars worth of home renovations from a company that had been linked to the Gambino Crime Family, which U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia characterized as having "sold his office."

After years of evasion, Mr. Giuliani somewhat reluctantly acknowledged that he had been advised of Mr. Kerik's relationship - if not the illicit transaction itself - with one of the two brothers who owned the company before he appointed him Police Commissioner in August 2000. Yet despite that, and a series of other indiscretions on Mr. Kerik's part that surfaced over the next four years, Mr. Giuliani had recommended that his one-time campaign driver and close friend be nominated for U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security at the end of 2004.

The revelations that erupted while Mr. Kerik was withdrawing from consideration a week after President Bush nominated him prompted questions then about Mr. Giuliani's judgment, and Senator McCain raised them anew after the latest Kerik indictment. It was as if Mr. Giuliani had disregarded the danger that media scrutiny of Mr. Kerik had posed to both of them because of either misguided loyalty to his friend or visions of fat contracts coming to his consulting firm from the Department of Homeland Security if Bernie was in charge.

Tarnished 9/11 Image

Part of the fallout from Mr. Kerik's nomination had been the revelation that he had carried on affairs with two women in a Battery Park City apartment that had been set aside as a place to rest for cops, firefighters and other workers involved in the search for bodies at the World Trade Center. This was the tawdriest detail to take some of the shine off Mr. Giuliani's image as it pertained to 9/11, but the former Mayor was also a victim of his own determination to exploit the tragedy for both financial and political gain.

His net worth, which last week was estimated at about $50 million in one published report, was enhanced considerably by the speeches he gave - at $100,000 per, with rock star-type perks thrown in for himself and his traveling party - about his leadership on 9/11. In 2006 alone, he earned more than $10 million on the lecture circuit, but he also spurred a backlash among some families whose relatives had died during the World Trade Center rescue efforts.

Mr. Giuliani's cool yet emotional performance in front of the TV cameras on that terrible day, at a time when President Bush had vanished from public view, made an indelible impression on the nation. But the families who followed him to campaign appearances - and were shunned at every one by Mr. Giuliani, who ducked out of side exits to avoid appearing in the same camera shots as the protesters - questioned why he should be profiting from the tragedy. They noted that he himself had not pulled anyone to safety, and had arguably contributed to the deaths of more than 100 firefighters who never heard a message to leave the Trade Center because his administration failed to provide replacements for the radios that had failed after the previous bombing of the complex in 1993.

'Aura Wasn't Enough'

"I think he thought the aura of 9/11 would carry him through," Ms. Connelly said. But the lack of any terrorist attacks here since that day led the issue to fade in importance, particularly as the economy worsened, and, she continued, Mr. Giuliani "really did not put forward a real program" to address those shifting concerns other than a call for big tax cuts.

He faltered in New Hampshire because his style of speaking: taking a few questions and then departing - not unlike the way he dealt with the media as Mayor - did not play well among voters who are used to engaging candidates in serious dialogues about issues that concern them. And when Mr. Giuliani decided to marshal his forces in Florida, Ms. Connelly said, he was plagued by the same strategy that hurt him in smaller states: "He did not invest in a field operation - just direct-mail fund-raising. And as America got to learn about the Rudy New Yorkers knew, he went down in the polls. [His campaign] spent a lot of money - but none of his - to go nowhere."

Mr. Giuliani's success in reducing crime as Mayor never got the plaudits it perhaps should have among many residents because in the process he exacerbated racial tensions. Whatever credit he earned for tactical skills when it came to criminal justice was contrasted by his ineptness in transforming the struggling school system, where his primary strategies - trashing Schools Chancellors and calling for vouchers for parents to move their children to private schools - were products of his own abrasive personality and a desire to appeal to national Republicans rather than on-the-merits policies.

Heroic and Cowardly

It was not a shock that he rose to the occasion of 9/11. Going back to his days as U.S. Attorney, Mr. Giuliani had produced enough moments of courage and intelligence to make us aware that at his best he could be a gifted public servant.

But he had also provided ample evidence over the years of his capability for weakness and venality, from smearing a dedicated public servant like Mr. Murphy rather than take what would have been a minor public-relations hit, to his insensitivity to the feelings of families whose children had been killed by police on his watch.

Following the brutalization of Abner Louima by a Police Officer in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct stationhouse in August 1997, Mr. Louima asserted that cops had tried to scare him prior to the assault by suggesting they could do what they wanted because "It's Giuliani time."

Mr. Louima eventually admitted he had invented that conversation, hoping that a lie that had the ring of truth because of Mr. Giuliani's hard-nosed image would draw more attention to what had happened.

Mr. Giuliani, with more time to reflect on his actions and their consequences, tried to use the image he had carefully concocted to win his party's nomination for President, hoping the myth would overshadow the troubling aspects of his career, both as Mayor and in the years since, as well as his flip-flops on issues to make himself more ideologically compatible with Republican voters.

Odd Kinship With Lindsay

They didn't buy it, and his political career likely had its obituary written last Tuesday. There was a distinct irony that it came in Florida, which was also the burial ground for the presidential hopes of the last New York Mayor to seek the White House, John Lindsay.

Mr. Giuliani often seemed to govern as the antidote to the last man before him to be elected to City Hall as a Republican. Where Mr. Lindsay cultivated black voters, Mr. Giuliani seemed to shun them and blatantly ignored their elected representatives if they had ever criticized him. Mr. Lindsay expanded public-assistance programs; Mr. Giuliani slashed them without providing meaningful job-training programs that would allow former welfare recipients to gain lasting employment.

Mr. Lindsay antagonized cops by not automatically siding with them after controversial shootings. Mr. Giuliani aggressively supported the police in almost all such cases, but he eventually alienated officers by not living up to implied promises to treat them well at the bargaining table, instead forcing them to accept two separate wage freezes covering 42 months.

And like Mr. Lindsay, he was far more popular outside the city than among its residents, who had reason to know him better.

At least, that is, until their quests for national office made a larger electorate aware of how far their images departed from reality.

That is why, while Mr. Giuliani may ponder his lost opportunity, there is no reason for anyone else to feel regret at his political demise.
 

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