It seems like just a few months ago--October to be exact--I was chatting with a person working for President Bush who was anticipating a plum new job in the Giuliani administration. Sure, there would be some rough sledding with Hillary Clinton in the fall. She’s a formidable candidate. But in the end, my overconfident Muscatel-quaffing lunchtime chum looked forward to serving another commander-in-chief who would make national security his top priority. My conversational partner was mistaken. So were those pundits and pollsters who also viewed America’s Mayor as a lock. And as I articulate a few less obvious reasons to explain Giuliani’s stunning plunge let me begin by noting that Giuliani himself erred by accepting his party’s nomination for the presidency in August 2007.
For reasons I never fully fathomed, Giuliani ran in the Republican primaries as if he were running against Hillary Clinton (who is no longer a lock either). A psychological reading--not my preferred mode of political analysis--might suggest that he never got over his aborted run for the senate in 2000. Perhaps this explains why the specter of Hillary and Hillary alone could resurrect the old, nasty Giuliani.
That would be the Giuliani who backed down from no one. That was the Giuliani who struck preemptively. The Giuliani who bullied School’s Chancellors and whistle blowers left and right. The Giuliani who gave Yasser Arafat the old heave ho. The Giuliani we New Yorkers knew and loved. And hated.
In short, Rudy 2007 was way too nice and solicitous of his GOP rivals. Why didn’t he sarcastically call into question Mitt Romney’s credentials to lead during a national security crisis? Why didn’t he portray Mike Huckabee as a small-time yokel from an off-off-off Broadway state? Why didn’t he show John McCain a little of what he showed the Brooklyn Museum and express outrage at his past ethical lapses? Why didn’t he jack up Tom Tancredo at one of those dull debates, if only because he could and because it might be fun to do so?
Last, I want to suggest, hesitantly, that Rudy had another major problem. No, not John McCain (who certainly did siphon off War on Terror voters) but Mike Huckabee. What puzzled poll watchers in the summer was that Giuliani was the most popular candidate among Evangelicals. I don’t mean to posit a direct correlation, but I can’t help but notice that the former governor of Arkansas’ surge coincides fairly neatly with Rudy’s mid-autumn swoon.
One possibility is that the emergence of Huck reminded Conservative Christians that they needn’t settle for anything but The Real McCoy. Still, up until very recently Evangelicals were--laudably--willing to give Rudy a look.
But he refused to fight for them or any other GOP constituencies. Put simply, Rudy was just too happy to be here, too happy to be the Republicans' presumptive frontunner. And for these reasons he was forced to exit, stage right.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
