The Buzz on Giuliani earlier this week is that he's too weird to be electable, citing his fourteen year marriage to his second cousin and a variety of socially liberal positions he's embraced over the years.

My take on this is that Giuliani's immense personal charisma and solid record as mayor of New York and hero of 9/11 clears the decks of everything but what he has in his metaphorical pockets since then. Stuff like this really helps.

GIULIANI: I mean, you can look at the practical and common sense conclusion on that anyway you want. But there’s something more important than that. We have a right of free speech in this country and we elect people to make decisions. Here’s what I would prefer to see them do, though, if you ask me what’s my view on that. The nonbinding resolution thing gets me more than are you for it or against it. I have tremendous respect for the people who feel that we either made a mistake going to war, who voted against the war, who now have come to the conclusion, changed their minds, they have every right to that, that it’s wrong, you should, in a dynamic situation, keep questioning. What I don’t like is the idea of a nonbinding resolution.

KING: Because?

GIULIANI: Because there’s no decision.

KING: But it’s a statement.

GIULIANI: Yes, but that’s what you do. That’s what Tim Russert does and that’s what Rush Limbaugh does. That’s what you guys do, you make comments. We pay them to make decisions, not just to make comments. We pay them to decide. The United States Congress does declarations, the war…

KING: So if you feel that way, withhold funds and that’s the way you feel?

GIULIANI: The ones I think have a better understanding of what their responsibility is and are willing to take a risk are the ones who are saying we’ve got to hold back the funds, we’ve got to vote against the war or we’re for the war. And maybe it’s because I ran a government and I tend to be a decisive person. I like decisions. And I think one of the things wrong with Washington is they don’t want to make tough decisions anymore. Non-binding resolution about Iraq, no decision on immigration, no decision on Social Security reform, no decision on what to do about energy independence, no decision. You know why that happens? Because it’s unpopular.

Frankly, I'm happy to have Democrats do nothing while in power.

Giuliani has demonstrated an amazing capacity to extemporize and get it right. Its a dangerous play in a presidential election, but if you can do it, you get high marks indeed.

Should a presidential candidates public humiliation of his wife and children have any bearing on whether you vote for him or not?

Richard Land, head of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention, told The Associated Press that evangelicals believe the former New York City mayor showed a lack of character during his divorce from his second wife, television personality Donna Hanover.

"I mean, this is divorce on steroids," Land said. "To publicly humiliate your wife in that way, and your children. That's rough. I think that's going to be an awfully hard sell, even if he weren't pro-choice and pro-gun control."

Giuliani married his longtime companion, Judith Nathan, in 2003. They had dated publicly while Giuliani was married to Hanover. His first marriage ended in an annulment.

One cannot live life without some regrets over personal failures and disappointments. Even if you aren't a religious person, you can still at least entertain the hope of redemption. Yet personal failures more often than not, simply reflect inherent character flaws--weaknesses exposed by circumstances. We find our cowardice in battle, our dishonesty when tempted, our disloyalty when threatened. Conversely we also find our strengths in extremity.

What does Giuliani's dishonorable behavior mean in terms of a prospective presidency?

I think Bill Clinton answered this question to some degree. A lot of people dismissed his bimbo eruptions as irrelevant to his abilities to discharge his presidential responsibilities, but as we discovered, the bimbos were symptoms of a deeper, more threatening character flaw.

The issue is perhaps too subjective to answer definitively, but I gotta tell ya, I understand why some people are concerned.

Judith Giuliani has had to cop to her first marriage after investigators unearthed the marriage certificate in Las Vegas.

Like a lot of thrice-married women, Mrs. Giuliani succumbed to the temptation to knock one off the list--after all, two marriages is not that unusual, but three suggests that you might be the problem.

The real question is why the Giuliani campaign didn't address this issue right out of the gate?

Rudy's marriages are a matter of public record, and a problem for the campaign. One would think that the best thing to do was dump the whole sorted mess at one time and deal with it in unitary fashion, rather than prolong the agony with new revelations. Are we going to find a fourth marriage in a few months?

Three marriages doesn't speak well of Rudy's judgment. Keeping his wife's first marriage under wraps doesn't ameliorate that impression.

[Warning: This post contains satire and black humor]

Rudy Giuliani isn't going to equivocate on abortion rights--he's for them and he's going to say so.

After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday.

At the same time, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign — seeking to accomplish the unusual task of persuading Republicans to nominate an abortion rights supporter — is eyeing a path to the nomination that would try to de-emphasize the early states in which abortion opponents wield a great deal of influence. Instead they would focus on the so-called mega-primary of Feb. 5, in which voters in states like California, New York and New Jersey are likely to be more receptive to Mr. Giuliani’s social views than voters in Iowa and South Carolina.

I'm starting to think Rudy is starting a trend in Republican circles.

Chicago school economist Stephen Levitt explained the plummeting of crime statistics, abortion and other social ills in the middle 1990s as a result of Roe v. Wade. Further analysis determined that legal abortion also disportionately affects liberal Democrats, who in spite of being only 20% of the population, have half of all abortions.

Suddenly abortion has an upside.

Others have surmised that since children usually emulate their parent's voting patterns, the prevalence of abortions among liberals resulted in a "Roe gap" of 18 million missing Democrats in the 2004 election cycle. That number is expected to grow to over 25 million by next year.

Meanwhile conservative Republicans are "choosing" to have Republican babies and lots of them. Utah, where I live, has the youngest and most Republican demographics in the nation. Its really no surprise to me. One of my business partners has seven little Republicans, promising to create serious problems for Democrats for many elections to come.

While me and mine "choose life", I'm pretty ambivalent about forcing liberal Democrats to birth the next generation of muggers, murderers and Democrat voters. If they want to self-select for extinction, should I be really standing in their way?

Perhaps Ann Romney's $150.00 contribution was just doing her bit to rejig the balance between conservative and liberals in Massachusetts? As to whether she personally believes in abortion? She had five sons for crying out loud!

In the end, that might end up being best political position on abortion--not for "me" personally, but if you dysfunctionals want to engage in a program of personal eugenics, by all means, go right ahead.

Its tough to run for president--everything you ever did or said is examined and found fault with. What you haven't done or said is also a vulnerability. Occasionally a candidate does something so foolish that it entirely derails the campaign. John Kerry's clumsy remarks about how poor scholastic performance could result in someone ending up in Iraq as a soldier are a case in point. Kerry's campaign was DOA.

Has Rudy Giuliani, the current Republican so-called frontrunner, mortally wounded his own campaign?

Fred Kaplan writes a pretty devastating criticism of Giuliani being AWOL from the Iraq study group, and while it hasn't yet received a lot of traction, its an arrow to the heart of the Giuliani campaign.

If you don't read Newsday, you might not know (I didn't until this week) that Rudy Giuliani was an original member of the Iraq Study Group—the blue-ribbon commission co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton—but he was forced out after failing to show up for any of the panel's meetings.

The day after the Newsday story appeared, Giuliani explained that he'd started thinking about running for president, and his presence on the panel might give it a political spin. "It didn't seem that I'd really be able to keep the thing focused on a bipartisan, nonpolitical resolution," he said.

The more likely reason for Giuliani's no-shows is much plainer—money. Craig Gordon, the Newsday reporter who wrote the story in the Long Island paper's June 19 edition, discovered that on the three days of meetings that Giuliani missed (before quitting), he was out of town, delivering highly lucrative speeches.

On April 12, 2006, he was giving a keynote address at an economics conference in South Korea for a fee of $200,000. On May 18, he was giving a speech on leadership in Atlanta for $100,000.

At that point, Baker gave Giuliani an ultimatum: Start showing up for sessions, or quit. On May 24, he quit, noting in a letter (provided to Gordon) that prior commitments prevented him from giving the panel his "full and active participation." (He was replaced by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, a puzzling choice for the job; maybe he was the only public figure Baker could find on such short notice. According to someone I know who attended one session, the elderly Meese "was barely conscious.")

Meanwhile, Giuliani was raking in exorbitant speaking fees around this time—according to Gordon, $11.4 million in the course of 14 months, $1.7 million for 20 speeches during the monthlong period that coincided with the Baker-Hamilton sessions.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I doubt that I would have forgone six figures of easy income for the privilege of yakking about Iraq with a roomful of graybeards all day long. Then again, I wasn't about to run for president—the highest office of public service—on a résumé bereft of a single foreign-policy credential.

Rudy's choice—to go for the money—speaks proverbial volumes about his priorities.

Kaplan's criticism appears picayune, even to someone like me who isn't particularly enamored with Rudy Giuliani. Its doubtful that money was a motivation since he doesn't lack for opportunities to give highly-compensated speeched. In fact, the Iraq Study Group gig might well have boosted demand for his insights.

It seems more likely that Giuliani saw the ISG as too much of a policy commitment in an ambiguous situation. There is a reason they stock these panels with old political war horses--Lee Hamilton and James Baker are out of the game. They neither gain or lose from whatever positions they end up taking. For Rudy though, what might have looked like an opportunity to pad the resume might well end up an anchor around his neck. In hindsight, that is precisely how it turned out. The ISG report was roundly panned by nearly everyone.

Still, the story reveals a considerable flaw in candidate Giuliani which Kaplan illustrated rather well.

The fact is, Giuliani has no idea what he's talking about. On the campaign trail he says that the terrorist threat "is something I understand better than anyone else running for president." As the mayor of New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, he may have lived more intimately with the consequences of terrorism, but this has no bearing on his inexperience or his scant insight in the realm of foreign policy. He is, in fact, that most dangerous would-be world leader: a man who doesn't seem to know how much he doesn't know.

McCain wants to stay the course. Romney is articulating a comprehensive strategy. Giuliani has no policy.

Ultimately, the Giuliani campaign appears to have miscalculated, believing that Rudy's terrorism credentials were unassailable, but strength isn't going to be enough in this campaign--people want a problem-solver.

Increasingly, I am reading apologia for Rudy Giuliani's three marriages. They sound a lot like the apologetic written on behalf of Bill Clinton after it became clear that he had been diddling interns in the Oval Office.

I realize that a fair number of Americans could never bring themselves to vote for a man who’s gone through one or two divorces. They’d view him as a deeply flawed individual. On the other hand, there might be something to be said for electing such a man. After all, it shows that he is able to acknowledge that he’s made a mistake, but that he has an optimistic spirit and is ready to pick up the pieces and move on. He is the sort who can say, and mean, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Although even I can see where there is such a thing as saying it too often.

It sounded lame then, and it sounds lame now.

There simply is no "innocent" explanation for three marriages. One divorce is sad, two suggests some deeper dysfunction.

Since Prelutsky takes the liberty of positively interpreting the Giuliani divorces, let me take similar liberties. Divorce if failure--failure of judgment, failure of commitment and just plain character flaws.

Fine--you can redeem yourself from all of these and make it work the next time around--certainly Ronald Reagan did.

But Rudy got his first marriage annulled after 14 years and behaved abominably during his second divorce after 18 years of marriage to Donna Hanover and two children, publicly humiliating his wife and children with an open affair with Judith Nathan, now Judith Giuliani.

It doesn't seem like Rudy learned much. If 32 years of marriage and divorce weren't enough to change his ways, do you think five years with his paramour have done the trick?

Rudy has issues--there is no way around it, and considering how so much of a successful presidency is character, Rudy's a risky proposition.

While the spinners are going to work very hard to characterize Hillary's political opportunism as something "harmless", there is only one question that needs to be answered--would you want to be in Hillary's shoes if the situation in Iraq keeps improving?

"I was for the war, then I was against it." Will she be for the war again next year?

This was a no-brainer for Giuliani. He gets to attack the presumptive nominee of the rival party and produce a tacit contrast with his own consistency on the topic. Nice move. I bet the other candidates wish they would have done it.

Jonah Goldberg explores the "schoolmarmish fog" of Hillary Clinton.

Can a candidate who never gives a straight answer beat someone who is clear and consistent in his positions? Generally I would say no, but ultimately this election will turn less on the personal style of the candidates and more on the party's Iraq war narrative. If things go into the crapper in the next year, Hillary wins. If not, she loses.

I think its that simple.

Rudy Giuliani figures he can shame the conservative Evangelical Christian camp into laying off his messy family life.

"I'm guided very, very often about, 'Don't judge others, lest you be judged,'" Giuliani told CBN interviewer David Brody. "I'm guided a lot by the story of the woman that was going to be stoned, and Jesus put the stones down and said, 'He that hasn't sinned, cast the first stone,' and everybody disappeared.

Unfortunately for Giuliani, standing for election is an invitation to be judged, and he doesn't get to define the boundaries of that judgment. In a post-Monica world, the propensity of a president to exhibit poor judgment in his personal relationships is extremely relevant.

Would I want to be judged by the standards with which I am judging Giuliani? Why not? What are we saying here--three marriages and the public humiliation of a former spouse and one's children are simply things that could happen to you or I?

Giuliani is also making the same mistake unchurched Democrats make when they start quoting the bible--they don't know how their audience is going to perceive the text. The text is often misinterpreted to mean "don't exercise judgment", but more sophisticated exegsis which I would expect would be more common among the Evangelical base, is that it refers to compassion for sinners and redemption for the repentant.

If Rudy wanted to really impress Evangelicals, he would publicly acknowledge his adultery, and ask for forgiveness from Donna Hanover and his children. That would be far more authentically Christian and my guess is that it would wipe out the issue for him.

The fact that he didn't do this is a strong signal that his Christianity is of the John Kerry-Hillary Clinton variety--a very thin veneer.

This past weekend, I finally grokked why Giuliani is doing so well in the polls.

My rock-ribbed Republican brother-in-law casually mentioned that his parents were shocked, shocked that he supported the Giuliani candidacy over intermountain west regional favorite Mitt Romney (my sister's inlaws are from Idaho...).

So why Giuliani over Mitt?

The perception of Giuliani's "strength" on national security issues is his ticket to ride. The reputation and the tough talk resonate with the security Moms and Dads in the Republican party. Romney's problem? Too slick.

There is that peculiar element of the Republican party that just doesn't trust well-spoken, well-educated, cultured candidates. They need to hear that drawl, see that cowboy hat and know there is a ranch back there somewheres...

I like cowboy hats and ranches too, and the drawl doesn't put me off, but after seven years of George W. Bush, bless his heart, I am ready for slick. I want a president who can reveal for the public, the intellectual deficit of David Gregory with a bon mot, who can articulate the issues and involve the public in a national agenda. Is Mitt Romney that guy?

No, but I believe he has the capacity to become that guy in a way that none of the other candidate can even approach.

Anyway, enough about my views, its Giuliani's old friends in New York that interest me:

It’s the middle of October and Rudy Giuliani is still leading the race for the Republican nomination. His old enemies in New York can’t understand it.

“It’s totally unbelievable,” said Charles Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation and a longtime adversary of Mr. Giuliani. “I refuse to believe that this could possibly happen to our country. I have too much confidence in our country to believe that this could really happen.”

All presidential candidates have some element of hometown opposition—constituents angry about a factory closing, politicians spiteful about losing a bill or an election. But no candidate engenders as much local animus as Mr. Giuliani, whose terms as mayor were characterized by a series of spectacular running battles with various, mostly liberal constituencies.

For the first months of his candidacy for president, prominent progressives in New York mocked the notion that a pro-choice, immigration-friendly serial husband with a history of opposition to guns would have a shot at the Republican nomination.

But now, with Mr. Giuliani up nearly 10 percentage points in national polls and unexpectedly competitive in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, a mixture of nervousness and disbelief is running through the ranks of his old antagonists.

“People say, ‘Still?’” said Mark Green, a former New York City public advocate and persistent foil to Mr. Giuliani. “If the other 49 [states] knew what we knew, he wouldn’t be in the ballpark, much less winning the game.”

Granted, Giuliani's critics in this case are highly partisan, very left-wing Democrats and the results speak for themselves, but one can't entirely dismiss their views.

Not all of Mr. Giuliani’s old critics have been surprised by his improbable success so far.

Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, a onetime friend of the former mayor who went on to write an investigative biography of Mr. Giuliani as well as the unflattering Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, said he never doubted that Mr. Giuliani would go far.

“I always believed he would be the Republican nominee,” said Mr. Barrett, who thinks that the incredulity over Mr. Giuliani’s run is a specifically “New York view.”

“I bump into it all the time, even with my own book publisher, who didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “We don’t take it seriously because we know him too well.”

He added, “The only thing I can do is write about it and find some new things about Rudy. It’s not hard.”

Can the campaign survive once the public gets past the legend and really gets to know Rudy? Lots of people opposed Ronald Reagan, but he always had the respect of his enemies. Its notable that a guy like Charlie Rangel, who represents everything diametrically opposite to conservative principles, is well-liked by his conservative friends. Its an important skill for a president to maintain the lines of communication when the other guys hates everything you are doing. Rudy Giuliani has demonstrated that he doesn't have those skills, and it seems likely that the closer he gets to the nomination, the more virulent the opposition to his candidacy is going to be.

I guess its better to have this than not to have it...

"I thought it was important for me to make it clear that Rudy Giuliani is more than acceptable to people of faith," said Robertson. "Given the fractured nature of the process, I thought it was time to solidify around one candidate."

He insisted that while some on the "fringe" of the social conservative movement may see Giuliani as an unacceptable nominee, the "core know better."

Robertson said although he and Giuliani disagree on social issues, those disagreements "pale into insignificance" when measured against the import of the fight against global terrorism and radical Islam. "We need a man who sees clearly how to deal with that issue," said Robertson.

The mainstream media obviously thinks this is a big deal, and why shouldn't they? They've been writing about the "religious right" monolith for decades at this point with no real clue what they are dealing with among Evangelicals.

Pat Robertson has an impressive television ministry, which of course is nothing at all like having a real ministry. There's a lot of money in it, but influence--real influence among Evangelicals occurs at the congregational level. They also have no idea how competitive various Evangelical "leaders" are with each other. No one a CBN has anything good to say about Jimmy Swaggart...(or vice versa I presume).

Evangelicals themselves are also a highly-independent bunch, essentially choosing their congregations according to their tastes and preferences. The idea that Pat Robertson is simply going to tell Evangelicals who to vote for is laughable.

In my view, Giuliani is suffering from--dare I call it this? New York parochalism. Its the idea, common among Northeastern Democrats but by no means limited to them, that everyone is part of a faction with common interests, with whose "leaders" one can strike deal. Rudy probably thinks he has the Evangelical vote sown up at this point and is sitting pretty. His view is reflected by his campaign strategy, which eschews the traditional retail politics for a
"national strategy".

Unfortunately for Rudy--the country is not New York.

Evangelicals, unlike Catholics, Mormons and other hierarchally organized religions, are an exceptionally independent bunch whose loyalties exist at the congregational level. Its not uncommon for Evangelicals to shop around for a congregation they like as well as biblical teaching that they find compatible with their own views. Does anyone familiar with the realities of Evangelicalism really think these people are going to vote the way Pat Robertson tells them to? James Dobson, or anyone else?

Not likely.

The reality is that Giuliani, Romney and anyone else interested in the Evangelical vote is going to have to do what George H.W. Bush did and then again what George W. Bush did--visit Evangelical congregations one-at-a-time.

We know for sure that Fred Thompson is not going to want to work that hard...

P.S: Unstated in any of this is whether CBN is going to share their mailing lists with he Giuliani campaign. An estimated 3 million people contribute to CBN at some level. That could be worth something, but its so 1980s. Modern demographic science is so much better and doesn't require deals with slimey guys like Robertson.

Sister Toldja

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."

Its old news, but its being treated as it if was a bombshell--Rudy Giuliani billed some expenses to obscure departments while he was wooing the current Mrs. Giuliani.

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.

The story is a little bizarre. The mayor need security, and security costs money and its charged to the mayor's office. The real impropriety concerns what the mayor was doing in South Hampton--but that's old news. Giuliani has taken whatever hit he's going to take for egregiously embarrassing his family with a very public affair with his now wife.

If there is a story, it hasn't been reported yet--and that refers to the fact that Giuliani disposed of the expenses in a rather elaborate misdirection. Let Politico discover what was going on with that and try again...

I wrote a couple of days ago that I wasn't particularly impressed with the "revelation" that Giuliani incurred a lot of security expenses while wooing his current wife.

I am also not impressed at how he has handled the controversy.

This story is five years old. It came out two hours before a debate. It’s a typical political hit job with only half the story told … not that second part told … that every single penny was reimbursed … that all of this was public. All of this was discoverable. It was not done in a way that nobody could see it. But it was a typical - this particular case - it was sort of a debate day dirty trick.

Does this remind you of Hillary Clinton or Ronald Reagan?

George W. Bush has had to endure a daily savaging far more unfair than anything Giuliani has every seen--its the nature of the job for a Republican president. If you don't know that and can't deal with it, you have no business running for president. Whining works for Democrats because its considered a virtue in those circles. No so for the country at large, and certainly not for the president.

Lets also be clear that mining someone's record doesn't constitute political dirt. Is the misallocation of funds relevant in a political campaign? It absolutely is. Giuliani simply needed to explain clearly and fully what was going on.

The way Bush deals with critics and criticism is one of the things I admire about him. All the presidential candidates should take a page from his book.