LA Mayor Giuliani

Patt Morrison did a little devil's arithmetic to come up with the next mayor of Los Angeles in case Hillary Clinton is elected president.

She's got a Cabinet to fill. And who's her California main man? Who was there for her way back, before Obamamania, bringing in Latino votes in sheaves?

Antonio Villaraigosa. Mr. Future Secretary of Education or Labor or HHS Villaraigosa. Instead of running for reelection in 2009, he's out of the Getty House and off to the Beltway. Adios, City of Angels and psychotic traffic; hola, City of Lobbyists and cheap taxi rides.

But what happens to us? L.A. will need a mayor, pronto.

I have just the man.

The mastermind mayor, the man who can whip a civic entity into shape faster than Richard Simmons on crack. He's tanned, he's rested and he's ready for some Hollywood prime time -- Rudy Giuliani!

What's that? Is he available? Not long ago, he was reeling in six figures for a single speech. Two weeks ago, he couldn't entice a hundred people out to hear him talk for free in Florida.

Of course he's available.

The reasons why she thinks he'd be great -- he'd increase parking-ticket revenue, he'd stop ex-New Yorkers from talking about how great things were in the city they left, he'd pick fights with Cardinal Mahony -- are more digs at transplangelenos than exultations of Giuliani. I do, however, know quite a few people who would be thrilled. I'm not one of them.

Rudy's campaign kaput

Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign appears all but formally dead tonight after he finished third in Florida -- the state for which he had skipped campaigning in the early primaries and focused most his energy, the state that on Monday he said would pick the Republican nominee.

Perhaps he was living an illusion all along.

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president took impressive wing last year, as the former mayor wove the pain experienced by his city on Sept. 11, 2001, and his leadership that followed into national celebrity. Like a best-selling author, he basked in praise for his narrative and issued ominous and often-repeated warnings about the terrorist strike next time.

Voters seemed to embrace a man so comfortable wielding power, and his poll numbers edged higher to where he held a broad lead over his opponents last summer. Just three months ago, Anthony V. Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s affable senior policy adviser, surveyed that field and told The New York Observer: “I don’t believe this can be taken from us. Now that I have that locked up, I can go do battle elsewhere.”

In fact, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was about to begin a free fall so precipitous as to be breathtaking. Mr. Giuliani finished third in the Florida primary on Tuesday night; only a few months earlier, he had talked about the state as his leaping-off point to winning the nomination.

As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign.

(The presumed end of Giuliani for President unfortunately dates a cover story I wrote for this week's Jewish Journal. Our paper is sent to the printer on Tuesday afternoon, several hours before the Florida outcome was known, and won't hit the streets until Thursday. Still, I read back through my article, which takes a look at who Jews are excited about and how they are involved with the campaigns -- Rudy was a favorite of Republican Jews -- and it didn't seem stale. Just that it needs an explanation, which it was given in the form of an editor's note.)

Giuliani's fall from grace really is amazing. As readers of The God Blog know, I was never a fan of the former mayor, whom I met in New York two years ago. (He was giving one of those expensive 45-minute speeches on "leadership during crisis" at a bail-industry conference that I was writing about for some extra green.) But many Republicans loved Giuliani, and when he entered the race, it was clearly his to lose.

In the past month alone, Giuliani's support among California Republicans plummeted 14 percentage points from 25 percent.

I just hope he makes it another two days, though CBS News is reporting he won't.

Rudy on Rudy: 'Somebody who can do the impossible'

Though he is not especially funny, Rudy Giuliani likes to begin with a joke. “Did you know that I’m running for President of the United States?”

That's how Elizabeth Kolbert begins a profile of the former New York mayor's presidential campaign, which, she writes is more of the same.

“This is where we really need a leader,” he told her. “We need somebody who can do the impossible. Now, I say that because I did this a lot in New York.”

Depending on whether you count his abortive race for the U.S. Senate in 2000, this is either Giuliani’s fourth or his fifth political campaign. In the earlier races, his goal was to persuade New Yorkers to vote for a Republican; this time around, it’s to persuade Republicans to vote for a New Yorker. Gone are the “Godfather” imitations, the snapping at the press, and the praise for immigration (“the single most important reason for American greatness”). The candidate who stopped by the Letizios’, and before that had coffee at Suzie’s Diner, in Hudson, and before that went on a holiday stroll in Nashua, where he waited in line to buy a Christmas ornament of a moose, is a less ethnic, less impatient, and more conservative candidate than voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx ever knew. This Giuliani invokes Ronald Reagan, smiles—or tries to—at children, and pledges to “secure our borders and identify every non-citizen in the nation.”

And yet the logic of his new campaign is—mutatis mutandis—the same as that of the old. Once again, Giuliani is in the awkward situation of wanting to represent a group of people whose views he does not actually represent. Once again, appeals based on “values” or personal history are closed to him. (Fourteen years ago—before he had appeared in drag, or ditched his second wife on TV, or met his third wife at a cigar bar—a “vulnerability study” commissioned by his staff noted that Giuliani’s “personal life raises questions about a ‘weirdness factor.’ ”) And so, once again, Giuliani is left to campaign on the basis of a single, strongly held idea: a great-leader theory of history, in which the great leader happens to be himself.

Nice try Rudy, but you're no Jewliani

Loyal readers know I'm no fan of Rudy Giuliani. Sure he has been masterful at bridging the divide between liberal New Yorkers and social conservatives, both of whom agree the Republican front-runner is scarier them President Bush. And though Catholic, Giuliani has been trying to play up his Jewishness. But I'm not the only one not buying this schlock.

According to Ken Kurson, a top Giuliani aide, if Bill Clinton was considered America's "first Black president," then Giuliani would be the first Jewish one.

While Giuliani did make an appearance on Seinfeld, and although one could argue that for years his comb-over served as a decent makeshift yarmulke, he screwed up a key component of being Jewish: We want to marry our mothers not our cousins.

The Jews for Ron Paul

I do not understand why Ron Paul is so popular on the Internet, though I did once find him to be worth a good quote. Anyway, JTA has a story out about the few Jews backing the maverick Republican running for president. (That's Ron Paul, not Crazy Rudy.)

Paul's candidacy was dismissed early on due to his support from white supremacist, Libertarian and other fringe groups, but the campaign has begun to pick up steam on college campuses and on the Internet, in part due to his staunch anti-war stance.

A longtime Texas congressman, Paul raised $4.2 million on Nov. 5 from 37,000 individual donors who agreed to give as part of a "money bomb" on Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the failed plot of a British mercenary to kill King James I in 1605. In September, he announced that he'd brought in $5.2 million in the previous three months, putting him ahead of John McCain in the Republican money race.

Even as Paul makes headway in some circles, organized Jewish support for his Republican presidential bid is nearly nonexistent, thanks to the candidate's longstanding stance against providing foreign aid, including U.S. assistance to Israel.

And last month, The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) pointedly did not invite him to participate in its candidates' forum. His reported support from extremist groups hasn't helped win him favor among Jews.

Still, Paul commands a loyal, albeit small, Jewish following. This Jewish support has followed the same pattern as Paul's backing from other groups -- coming from out-of-the way places on the Internet and taking mainstream media and political organizations by surprise.

In addition to Perry's Jews for Ron Paul, there is Zionists for Ron Paul -- an outfit launched by Yehuda HaKohen, an American immigrant to Israel, and some of his friends back in the United States.

Some of Paul's Jewish supporters believe that it would be best for Israel if the United States kept out of Jerusalem's affairs. There are also those who believe that American aid to Israel is dangerous because it feeds the perception that Jews wield too much influence over U.S. foreign policy.

"Many of us believe the current relationship between the United States and Israel is a very unhealthy relationship, like that of a man and concubine, or a slave and master," HaKohen said.

Pat Robertson endorses Giuliani -- who cares?

The New York Times, and their veteran reporter of the social conservatives beat, David D. Kirkpatrick, make a big mistake in today's story about televangelist Pat Robertson endorsing the Republican presidential candidate who has made most evangelicals so comfortable.

Rudolph W. Giuliani scored a coup today by winning the support of Pat Robertson, who, as one of the nation’s best-known televangelists, could help Mr. Giuliani reassure Republicans who are wary of his support for abortion rights and gay rights.

See, right there, they assume that Robertson, the same guy who said on air that the United States should seize the opportunity to assassinate Hugo Chavez, has any cultural currency. In the opinion of a twentysomething evangelical who reluctantly remains a Republican, Robertson's relevancy is deader than Jerry Falwell's.

Giuliani's former police commish to be indicted

As if it wasn't bad enough that Rudy Giuliani's personal priest was accused of pedophilia, now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination can expect his former business partner and close adviser, Bernard B. Kerik, to be indicted for tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy.

The grand jury, sitting in Westchester, has been hearing evidence about Mr. Kerik for more than a year as part of a broad federal investigation into a variety of allegations, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

If an indictment is voted up, as prosecutors are expected to request, it would remain sealed until Friday, when Mr. Kerik would be arraigned in United States District Court in White Plains.

Mr. Kerik served under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and questions about the former police commissioner and correction commissioner have been troublesome for Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign. There have been concerns about lapses in the vetting of his background when Mr. Kerik was named police commissioner.

And don't forget when Giuliani got President Bush to nominate Kerik for head of Homeland Security. Michael Wolff at Vanity Fair thinks Giuliani's relationship with Kerik says a lot about his attitude toward accountability.

And Bernie Kerik. There is no circumstance under which a politician with any sense of vulnerability or accountability or merely the need to maintain a sense of appearances hires Bernie Kerik (no less as the police commissioner). Kerik is from Paterson, New Jersey, where I'm from. He came to live in a house in the suburb just down the road from where my parents lived. I knew or had heard the same stories everyone else—my parents and my parents' friends—had heard. Which it seems impossible Rudy would not have heard, too. And if, somehow, he hadn't heard them, we know now from Rudy's own grand-jury testimony that he was, in fact, officially told—though, he says, it didn't quite register. In other words, one of the most experienced prosecutors of organized-crime figures has spelled out for him what is widely rumored—that his corrections chief and prospective police commissioner might be Mobbed up—and he doesn't get it. Yup. And then goes on to become business partners with the guy. And then becomes his sponsor for high federal office.

Let's not even get into the nature of Rudy's tolerance for whatever Kerik was into, and just focus on Rudy's sense of impunity—he's got no sense of caution. (A likely implosion point for the Rudy campaign is Kerik's anticipated trial for tax fraud and providing false information to federal authorities when he was vetted for the job of homeland-security chief, which Rudy sponsored him for.) It's about getting away with it. It's waving the red flag. It's his assumption that everybody is a pantywaist, except him.

Rudy talks the the talk with Jewish hawks

He's not the apple of evangelical Christians' eyes, but Rudy Giuliani is clearly the Republican Jewish Coalition's guy, what with his terrorist-fighting image and his employment of Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Pipes. Giuliani spoke to the RJC in Washington this morning. Here's some excerpts, via JoinRudy2008:

A lot of you are the first Republicans in your families, right? Am I right?

A lot of you get grief for being Republicans, right? As a three-time candidate and eight-year mayor of New York City, I know what you’re talking about. Wow.

I remember this happened so many times, I get all the incidents confused. But one that was particularly poignant was this man who was very, very old and frail came up to me and he grabbed my hand and he said, You’re the first Republican I ever voted for. I said, How old are you? He said, I’m 92 years old.

I said, In over like 80 years of voting or whatever, you couldn’t find another Republican to vote for? He said, I thought it was sinful.

Wow, has Giuliani been taking speaking lessons from President Bush? From here, he didn't take long to mention Sept. 11, and then he started hitting the right notes for many Jews, Republican and Democrat.

We’re the ones that really want peace in the Middle East, real peace, what it really means. Peace has to be based on realism, not romance. It’s shocking that 60 years after the Holocaust, the Jewish people are still required to negotiate for the right to exist.

This should be beyond negotiation. Someday I hope that Jews and Arabs can sit down together to negotiate borders, water, trade. It’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen more quickly if we remain strong and we remain really, really clear.

You cannot negotiate with someone who is threatening to destroy you and your family.

(skip)

What are you going to negotiate with them about? How many of your kids they’re going to kill or when they’re going to do it?

You’ve got to negotiate with people that at least make a step toward giving a reasonable possibility of getting a sensible result.

In the case of the Palestinians, here’s what it is, two big ones. First of all, the Palestinians have to say and acknowledge and mean it that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.

Number one, because Israel’s already negotiated its existence. That negotiation happened a long time ago and that’s over and they’ve just got to kind of move on.

Second, second, they have to be willing to say, We forsake terrorism and we’re going to help to reduce and eliminate terrorism and they need to show their good faith by that condition remaining that way for some period of time. It’s as simple as that — or as hard as that.

Evangelicals to split from Republican Party?

I've shared that evangelical Christians, widely credited with establishing the Bush presidency (I'm so embarrassed), are not happy with either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani. This is leading, according to the NY Times blog The Caucus, to a potential revolt led by Focus on the Family's James Dobson and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council to support a third-party candidate, though who is not clear.

A revolt of Christian conservative leaders could be a significant setback to the Giuliani campaign because white evangelical Protestants make up a major portion of Republican primary voters. But the threat is risky for the credibility of the Christian conservative movement as well. Some of its usual grass-roots supporters could still choose to support even a pro-choice Republican like Mr. Giuliani, either because they dislike the Democratic nominee even more or because they are worried about war, terrorism and other issues.

(skip)

For months, Christian conservatives have been escalating their warnings about the risk that nominating Mr. Giuliani could splinter the party. Dr. Dobson wrote a column declaring that he would waste his vote before casting it for either Mr. Giuliani or a Democrat who supports abortion rights like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Richard Land, the top public policy official of the Southern Baptist Convention, has said that nominating a Republican candidate who supports abortion rights would make white evangelical votes “a jump ball” between the Republicans and Democrats, with other issues taking the fore.

I don't imagine this coalition of evangelical leaders will be throwing their weight behind Michael Bloomberg.

Another neocon working for Giuliani

Look who Ken Silverstein found on Rudy Giuliani's presidential candidate roster: Daniel Pipes.

Pipes has been attacked by Muslim organizations as a fear-mongering Islamophobic fascist. But this comment from Pipes in a story I wrote about young American Muslims sympathetic to suicide bombings, in which the president of Long Beach's MSA told me he thinks Islam justifies the attacks on civilians, seemed pretty measured:

What you have is a low-wage jihad taking place, but people are not paying attention to it. These sentiments are seething, and at any time might erupt.

I noted last month that Giuliani, who has proven incredibly unpopular with evangelical Christians, had enlisted neoconservative Commentary editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz. Here's what Silverstein, the excellent Harper's Washington editor behind that lobbying story from July, had to say about Pipes:

I think it’s fair to say that Pipes is even further out ideologically than Norman Podhoretz, another Giuliani adviser. Readers unfamiliar with Pipes can check out his profile at Wikipedia. For a representative sampling of his work, consider a 2006 article he wrote in the Jerusalem Post (not available online):

Iraq’s plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition’s responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi’ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one.

Why New Yorkers don't like Rudy, but Red Staters do

Whenever you see Peter J. Boyer's byline, make sure you read what follows. Boyer is my favorite reporter still writing for The New Yorker. (The lifetime distinction goes to Joseph Mitchell, who died in 1996 after 58 years of reporting to the office.)

With 13,606 words in this week's magazine, Boyer waxes about what's become one of my favorite subjects -- the mistaken popularity and haphazard success of anti-moralist Rudy Giuliani.

Boyer opens with the scene from this spring of Giuliani approaching the capitol of staunchly conservative South Carolina, over which the Rebel flag stills flies and where this year the state house of reps passed laws banning gay civil unions and requiring women to see an ultrasound of their unborn child before receiving an abortion.

It was here that Rudolph Giuliani, New York’s thrice-married, anti-gun, pro-gay, pro-choice former mayor, found himself one morning in April, in what appeared to be a critical moment in his young campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination. The previous day, during a campaign stop in Florida, he was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if he supported the public funding of abortions. Giuliani seemed flustered by the question and finally answered, “If that’s the status of the law, I would, yes.”

Even before Giuliani began his run for the Presidency, the consensus, sounded in news columns, blogs, and political journals, was that he could not survive scrutiny of his political heterodoxy and his personal imperfections by the Republican Party’s conservative base.

Why then does a man who was recently described by a Vanity Fair contributor as literally insane remain the Republican front-runner? Boyer writes that it is not just Rudy's image as the hero of 9/11, but his standing as the caped crusader of Gotham.

The common refrain among New Yorkers is that although Giuliani showed leadership on the day of the terrorist attacks, in the preceding months he had been a spent and isolated lame duck, his viability sapped by churlishness and the spectacle of his unattractive personal dramas. But to many in the heartland Giuliani was heroic for what he did in New York before September 11th: his policy prescriptions and, mostly, his taming of the city’s liberal political culture—his famous crackdown on squeegee-men panhandlers, his workfare program, his attacks on controversial museum exhibits (“The idea of . . . so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick!”), and the like. Speaking before the Alabama legislature this spring, he received a standing ovation, and Governor Bob Riley told him, “One of these days, you have to tell me how you really cleaned up New York.” To conservatives, pre-Giuliani New York was a study in failed liberalism, a city that had surrendered to moral and physical decay, crime, racial hucksterism, and ruinous economic pathologies. Perhaps the most common words that Giuliani heard when he travelled around the country this spring were epithets aimed at his city (“a crime-infested cesspool,” one Southern politician declared), offered without fear of giving offense. Giuliani cheerfully agreed.

I still don't understand how Giuliani can go the distance without the endorsement of evangelical leaders, which has been essential to Republican candidates going back to Reagan and which the Democrats are now clamoring for. But Romney doesn't have it either.

We'll see.

Karl Rove's out -- what's next?

With chief Bush strategist Karl Rove throwing in the towel at the end of the month, can we expect a change in the Administration's strategy?

Rove himself claimed to not be religious, but his harnessing of the evangelical vote was central to Bush's rise and re-election. Maybe Rove is going to throw Rudy Giuliani a bone. Boy, does he need one.

Rudy not pro-choice?

I don't think it would make Rudy Giuliani any more popular with social conservatives if he dropped his support for abortion -- he's still pro-gun control and, man, talk about a lack of family values.

But Mark Kleiman, a professor at UCLA who writes at the insightful, and way left, blog The Reality-Based Community, argues that the former New York mayor really couldn't be considered pro-choice because he wants to re-arrange the Supreme Court in a way that would spell the end of Roe v. Wade.

So when Rudy Giuliani says he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges, he's pledging to appoint more justices willing to overturn Roe v. Wade; the fact that he sortakinda takes it back by saying there would be no litmus test doesn't really matter. Nor does the fact that, as a private citizen and a local politician he supports abortion rights; on the one issue where a President has to act on abortion he's fully committed to the RTL position. And Justice Stevens isn't getting any younger.

Thus it's not really right to describe Giuliani, the Presidential candidate, as someone who "supports abortion rights."

It's not clear how much this will help or hurt Giuliani in the primaries. But it could make all the difference in the general should Rudy be the nominee. To get the swing votes he would need, Giuliani would want to run as a "moderate" on abortion, which is about as close to the truth as his claim to be an "expert" on terrorism.

I'd like to hope that the press wouldn't let him get away with it. But perhaps I'd be wiser to hope for a pony.

(Photo: Salon)

Neocons for Rudy

There are people who really like Norman Podhoretz. They're called security hawks.

Podhoretz is an intellectual leader of neoconservatism, the political ideology credited with getting the US into Iraq. Last month, he made the case in Commentary for a preemptive strike on Iran. Yesterday he signed on to be an adviser to presidential-hopeful Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy is starting to look a bit like President Bush with the people he chooses to surround himself with. I wonder if he already has his plan of attack laid out.

Rudy's priest: the accused pedophile

For those of us not hot on history, the past six years have taught us plenty about the follies of presidents rewarding political loyalists with high-office jobs. Hurricane Katrina. The reconstruction of Iraq. The U.S. attorneys debacle. (It seems there should be some way to blame LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's recent run on Bush favoritism, but, alas, there is not.)

Now think about this: Rudy Giuliani, who continues to lead the polls among Republican presidential candidates despite losing the support of most evangelicals, employs his childhood friend despite Grand Jury accusations that the man is a pedophile. Salon has the story:

Giuliani employs his childhood friend Monsignor Alan Placa as a consultant at Giuliani Partners despite a 2003 Suffolk County, N.Y., grand jury report that accuses Placa of sexually abusing children, as well as helping cover up the sexual abuse of children by other priests. Placa, who was part of a three-person team that handled allegations of abuse by clergy for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, is referred to as Priest F in the grand jury report. The report summarizes the testimony of multiple alleged victims of Priest F, and then notes, "Ironically, Priest F would later become instrumental in the development of Diocesan policy in response to allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests."

Blogger Andrew Sullivan asks himself why Giuliani would affiliate with an alleged pedophile, even if charges weren't pursued.

Because he was Giuliani's childhood friend, best man at his first wedding, baptized his son, smoothed the way for his divorce annulment, and buried his mother. In Giuliani's world, family is family. Loyalty is loyalty. And the children can go to hell.

Rudy's crisis of faith

It seemed for the past few months that former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani could keep Republican voters so mesmerized by talking about 9/11 that he wouldn't have to confront the fact his politics are quite liberal for conservatives -- and way out of touch with evangelical Christians, who have been essential to Republican success since the early '80s.

But last month Giuliani's popularity began sliding. A week later, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, a man who's had Bush's ear, opined -- divined? -- that "Rudy's not the one." It seemed Giuliani's pro-choice, liberal leanings -- and his incredibly messy personal life (he married his second cousin and via news conference told his second wife he was filing for divorce) -- were just too much too swallow.

Today, Christianity Today, the sentinel of evangelicalism, added to the criticism, reporting "Conservative leaders doubt his support among evangelicals will last."

"I think a lot of evangelicals are just getting to know Rudy," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

"As they get to know him—not as the hero of 9/11 but as a supporter of tax-funded abortions—his support will decline precipitously."