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"America's Mayor"
Running for President as “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani is bucking the prevailing political winds, his personal past and 220 years of precedent.No one has ever made the direct leap from mayor (let alone ex-mayor) to President of the United States. Another hurdle: a socially conservative Republican Party that nominates candidates who stand foursquare against legalized abortion, gun control and gay marriage. Giuliani has a long record in support of all three. And then there are his three marriages and a divorce that led to another apparent historic first: a Presidential candidate whose own children have pointedly refused to endorse him.
Yet for all that, Rudy Giuliani is the man to beat for the Republican nomination in 2008. For the past few months, the former New York mayor has led the GOP field in public opinion polls and fund-raising. He draws large crowds, performs smoothly in debates and brings in big bucks from supporters.
“Something changed on 9/11,” says Lawrence Haas, a Democrat who worked in the Clinton White House. “Many Americans came to realize that they are seriously threatened by dangerous enemies, and Giuliani personifies the determination to confront those enemies. So Republicans are holding their collective noses on social issues and flocking to his side.”
Giuliani tells audiences that America was attacked by an enemy hell-bent on doing it again—“they hate you,” he says. “Right now, as we sit here enjoying breakfast, they are planning on coming here to kill us,” he told a group in Alabama.
He castigates Democrats for their reluctance to utter the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” and asserts that the other party’s candidates are mired in a pre-9/11 mind-set of playing “defense.”
It seems to be working. A Washington Post/ABC poll released in early October showed that a whopping 86 percent of Americans rated Giuliani’s performance on 9/11 to be “excellent” or “good.” Fully 73 percent of them found that performance to be indicative of how he’d do as President.
Giuliani says he is better positioned to attract crossover Democrats and Independents next November. It’s one of his three basic campaign pillars. The first is that, as the two-term mayor, he greatly improved New Yorkers’ quality of life and set a template for big-city mayors all over the country. The second is that, when the United States was attacked on 9/11, he ran toward danger, not away from it, and for months afterward displayed the leadership qualities America craves in its commander in chief. The third leg of his campaign stool is, perhaps, the most seductive to Republican voters: a head-to-head competition for all the marbles against the leading Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Giuliani told Reader’s Digest, “New York is one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic cities in the country, and I ran there and won by 16 percent, which you’d have to call a landslide for a Republican.” Now, he says, “I’m the only candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton.”
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