Its a given that Bernard Kerik is going to be a political liability for Rudy Giuliani. Yet fair-minded people still have to ask whether Kerik's plight is simply guilt-by-association or something more serious.

Full-disclosure: I am not a Giuliani supporter, although I do find that he has some compelling attributes. I seem to have lots of company as a recent AP poll suggests that Giuliani not only leads the national polls, but also leads as the second choice among voters who support his rivals. As fellow UNCoRRELATED blogger Mark Adams commented to me last week--people sense his authenticity (Mark also supports a rival candidate). I would add to this observation that I also believe he has genuine leadership and problem-solving abilities.

Yet the Kerik affair exacerbates my gravest doubts about him.

Bernie Kerik is an Horatio Alger story. His father abandoned the family while he was still an infant, and his mother turned to prostitution to support the family until she was murdered by her pimp when Bernie was nine. Unsurprisingly, Kerik gravitated towards the ideals of masculine power. He studied the martial arts, joined the army and the police--professions where he could carry a gun. To the tokens of his physical prowess, he added sexual prowess--marrying four times and having at least two long-term marital affairs that we know about.

Finally, he achieved substantial wealth, but like everyone else, Kerik discovered that the trophies of success aren't the same thing as the success itself. Everything he had he received by virtue of his relationship with Rudy Giuliani. His tax problems were entirely predictable--all sorts of lottery winners go through the exact same problem.

Knowing what we know about Kerik, can we extrapolate what his relationship with Rudy Giuliani might have been?

I think I can. I've seen this relationship before--a kind of symbiosis between two personality types where each one gets what they need from the other. What Giuliani got from Kerik was loyalty--unflagging, unquestioning loyalty. Why would Kerik be so loyal to Giuliani? I think its quite simple--he saw in Rudy all the qualities that he admired--the easy confidence, the intellectual power, the social ease of someone with the right education and the right friends.

Rudy on the other hand, is an extremely ambitious man surrounded by other ambitious men. In my experience, people break either one way or the other in this situation. Depending on their own insecurities or lack of them, they see those around them as talented collaborators, or threats to their own advancement.

The latter group aren't necessarily doomed to failure, in spite of their paranoia-motivated disregard to the intellectual resources around them. They can rise quite far on their own talent, but inevitably they surround themselves with toadies--Bernie Keriks--people they can safely manipulate with no fear of betrayal. Its usually pretty easy to tell when you are dealing with people like this, because their lieutenants are invisible.

Abraham Lincoln is universally considered either one or two among the great presidents and its notable that he surrounded himself with very high-powered people, many of whom were his rivals for his party's nomination. Notably, George W. Bush was similarly emotionally secure enough to do much the same (and like Lincoln, was occasionally disappointed...).

Other than Bernie Kerik, Giuliani's lieutenants are invisible, and that disturbs me. Stories of his need for absolute control are also ubiquitous.

The public soon learned that Giuliani was driven by an overriding need for control. He immediately stripped decision-making powers from dozens of city agencies and centralized them in his office. The men around him, many of them lawyers once derided in his U.S. attorney days as "Yes-Rudys," became the most powerful figures in city government. In the new regime, every morsel of information had to be vetted by the mayor's media operation at City Hall, down to the water reservoir levels released each day to the New York Times weather page. When Giuliani's famously successful police commissioner, William Bratton, resisted City Hall's tight rein and spoke freely to reporters (often about himself), Giuliani booted him from office. The mayor's press secretary charged, characteristically, that Bratton and his lieutenants, who were decimating crime by historic proportions, were "out of control."

One must acknowledge that Giuliani's paranoia was tempered by his immense talent and the demonstrable fact that New York City needed a dictator to clean up the mess. Yet the U.S. is not New York City, and the presidency is not a throne. Power magnifies our character, both its positive and negative elements. I fear that Rudy Giuliani as president will remind us much more of Jimmy Carter than Ronald Reagan.

Right Wing News:

If you think you're tired of hearing the words "culture of corruption" now, you just wait and see how you feel about it if Rudy's the nominee and there turns out to be 3 or 4 characters as shady as Kerik connected to him. It will be a disaster -- and, yes, it may very well happen.

What is worse for the Giuliani campaign is that Kerik’s indictment has opened up a target the size of a barn door for his opponents, and none of them seem to be too terribly shy in taking a shot at it. Perhaps the most pointed criticism comes from the reinvigorated McCain camp:

McCain emphasized that Giuliani should have begun questioning Kerik’s public service qualifications after he failed to adequately train the Iraqi police force in 2003.

“Supposedly his mission was to help train Iraqi police. He stayed a couple of months, got up and left,” McCain said. “That should have been part of anybody’s judgment before they would recommend that individual to be head of the Department of Homeland Security.”

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis issued an even more pointed assessment in a memo: “A president’s judgment matters and Rudy Giuliani has repeatedly placed personal loyalty over regard for the facts.”

This attack works on both levels. For one, it goes straight to the heart of how a Giuliani presidency might govern; perhaps one of the most important parts of being President is having the judgement to choose the right people to fill out your cabinet.

Sharon Cobb:

"I've been covering Giuliani as long as anyone and I can't guarantee to you, sitting here this morning, that he wouldn't make the same mistake again if he became president because Giuliani values loyalty over everything."