Being a sexless geek, good political campaigns are fun to watch for me. Great political campaigns are a thing of beauty. But really bad campaigns- the ones where you figure that the candidate and his senior advisers should be immediately institutionalized and sterilized - are my favorite ones of all.John Connally ran such a campaign in 1980. Being the Texas governor who was shot with Kennedy, an acolyte of Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon's favorite Democrat; Connally figured he was a natural for the Republican presidential nomination.
There was only one thing in Connally's way: Ronald Reagan, who Republicans were rather fond of at the time. The former governor had a plan, however. He would devote all of his time, energy and money on South Carolina. And he lost. Badly. Big John ended up spending $11 million to win a single delegate, a record at the time. The funniest part? The delegate was from Arkansas.
John Connally's record stood for a full 28 years until New York City's former mayor, Rudy Giuliani launched his campaign to become
Here's what what I wrote about that at the time;
Florida is an awfully tricky place to build a national campaign around. Firstly, you're messaging to three large and distinct voting blocs: Cubans, elderly Jews and white trash. Cubans don't really care about anything that doesn't involve the overthrow of Fidel Castro, elderly Jews are more commonly known as Democrats, and you can't get white trash to understand anything unless you discuss it in the context of an episode of Cops.I might just be the greatest cutie-pie of all. Admit it, the womenfolk among you want to sleep with me and the men want to be me. I am the man who predicted the downfall of Giuliani when he was still leading the national polls by wide margins. There is no other reasonable explanation for this other than I am better than you are.
Long story short, Florida is the last place you want to build a national campaign around. The single largest white, working-class Republican demographic there is serial killers, and they're famously unresponsive to voter outreach.
At that point, Giuliani seemed destined to fade in our collective memories as the guy who saw his police commissioner go to fucking prison for a really long time. It would have been sad if it wasn't so hilarious.
Well, as Bob Dylan tells us, things have changed. In the last year, New York has turned into every bit the clusterfuck of governance that makes people cast a lonley eye to Uganda. Governor Eliot Spitzer was discovered to enjoy pricey whores and was promptly replaced by
Rudy thought he saw an opening, if only because Rudy has the political self-awareness of a guy who huffs gasoline because he can't afford something more upscale, like Thunderbird. That's how Giuliani for Governor was born.
Giuliani for Governor sadly fell victim to SIDS about a week ago, thus sparing it from an almost sexual level of humilation at the hands of Andrew Cuomo. Since no one wants to see America's Mayor die with a ball-gag in his mouth, Rudy has apparently decided to run for Gillibrand's Senate seat instead.
Of course, he's missing the point entirely. Rudy wasn't a fantastic municipal campaigner. He did, as you might recall, lose to David Dinkins the first time, and he won the rematch by a much smaller margin than anyone thought possible. In his '97 re-elect, he won big, but he only beat Ruth Messinger, who may as well have been in the federal Witness Protection Program. For all anybody knows, Messinger may have been running against Giuliani as an ingenious way of hiding from the Mob.
Then there was the disaster that was his aborted 2000 Senate race. Hillary Clinton was easily one of the most hated people in America that wasn't Rudolph W. Giuliani. Hizzoner rectified that by telling the press that he was divorcing his wife before he actually told his wife. Those optics are somewhat less than ideal.
The Giuliani that was mayor prior to 9/11 isn't an easy man to like, which is why everybody hated him. Blacks and Hispanics saw him as something not unlike a contagious disease, which is downright fucking charitable compared to how Republicans felt about him. Endorsing and vigorously campaigning for Mario Cuomo in 1994 probably wasn't a great way to make friends with the GOP. Nor was being ardently pro-abortion, for gay rights and suing gun manufacturers. Rudy's entire mayoralty seemed to be built on the premise of making John Lindsay look like a Bircher. Catholics hated him simply because marrying each of your successive mistresses doesn't make adultery acceptable to them.
September 11, 2001, which killed 3,000 Americans in three states, saved Giuliani's political ass. Without 9/11, Rudy would still be seen as the pariah to virtually everyone that he was on September 10th. On that day, he became America's Mayor. This was to be his path to the White House.
Or it should have been, but for the fact that he went on to run the single worst presidential campaign I've ever seen - including Al Gore's. His presidential run proved that Rudy was an impatient man and not an especially bright one besides. He seems to have actually believed that national polls mean anything in the primaries.
He would drop shitloads of money in places like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina without spending any time there first. When his polling didn't immediately rise to Herculean levels of power, he'd move on. And that's how Florida became his version of the American embassy in Saigon. On both tactical and strategic levels, Giuliani for President was bad in ways that stagger the human imagination.
Worse, he repudiated every belief that made him acceptable to New Yorkers in a feeble attempt to make a naturally hostile national GOP love him. Now that he wants to run statewide, he has the unenviable task of convincing New Yorkers that he really isn't the same asshole who ran for president. That should be funny to watch because even the most conservative New Yorkers are pretty liberal on social issues.
The current polling makes a Giuliani Senate race look like a cakewalk, but those polls are stupid. Firstly, Rudy is far better known to New York voters than Kirsten Gillibrand, but so am I. After all, I have a blog. Sure, nobody reads it, but it's still more than Gillibrand has in the way of name identification.
Secondly, voters are going to want to know if the Senate seat is just a stepping stone for a quixotic quest for a particularly useless 2012 Republican presidential nomination. After watching both Hillary Clinton and Eliot Spitzer leave them in the last two years, New York voters would be right in thinking that their elected representatives have "commitment issues."
The problem is that Rudy won't commit to serving a full Senate term. And if he does, no one will believe him. He's already repudiated everything he proclaimed to stood for once, right?
Hizzonner won't do it because there is no way that he sees himself being in the lower ranks of Mitch McConnell's bitches. The last person that Rudy directly answered to was Ed Meese, which was quite some time ago.
Giuliani can have any nomination he wants in New York, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he can win a statewide race. The second Rudy announces for the Senate, Gillibrand gets a lot more famous by association. Once that happens, New Yorkers are going to start wondering which Rudy Giuliani they're voting for: the prick they hated before 9/11, America's Mayor, or the guy who still dreams of moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Unfortunately, multiple choice candidacies don't tend to be successful ones, particularly for Republicans in blue states.
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