Florida Strategy was Classic Rudy
Posted By Adam DickterPolitical Insider: Florida Strategy was Classic Rudy
As political observers pick apart the carcass of the Giulani presidential campaign, it seems apparent that the former mayor ran for the White House in much the same way that he ran the city: By concentrating on his strengths, and tuning out pretty much everything else.
The strategy echoes Giuliani's successful election bid in 1993, when he heavily concentrated his campaigning in Staten Island, the city's most Republican borough. Because of a referendum on secession from the city that year, turnout was extremely high there, and combined with enough Democratic votes elsewhere, that support put him over the top.
While governing, Giuliani prized loyalty to him above all else, rewarding acolytes and refusing to meet with critics, including much of the city's black elected leadership, which faulted his response to police brutality complaints. When he was re-elected in 1997, Giuliani in his victory speech promised to reach out to new segments of the city who felt they were not well served in the previous term. Instead, the city became further polarized for most of the second term, until 9-11 changed the city and gave him a new image as well as a political makeover.
Given his difficulty in being solicitous, it's not surprising that Giuliani apparently found it difficult to go to places where he had some support, but had to win over droves in order to get ahead.
"He went into New Hampshire, where he seemed to have a chance, spent a few million dollars there and when the polls didn't change, he pulls out," noted the National Review's Byron York on NBC's Meet The Press last Sunday.
Giuliani appeared supremely confident that Florida would be the "firewall" that would give him momentum heading into Super Tuesday after unimpressive showings in the earlier primaries. That's because he campaigned in areas that already loved him, communities packed with New York retirees, including many Jews. If you believed the throngs who turned out for him in those places, snapping pictures with him and getting his autograph, he was in great shape.
But what was likely overestimated by Giuliani and his advisors was how many of those adulating fans were actually registered Republicans, and of those, how many could be counted on not to abandon him once another candidate appeared more viable, as in the case of John McCain.
"This was clearly a Staten Island strategy - you concentrate on the areas you can win," Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio told me on Tuesday. "It was probably the right strategy at the time they developed it because he wasn't going to win Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan. Their strategic assumption that there would be no clear frontrunner was almost right. The only thing they can look back on with regret is New Hampshire, but even there he pumped in 3 million and didn't move the numbers."
Clearly, voters told Giuliani that the bloom was off the rose. Repeated mentions of his experience on 9-11, which seemed to somehow suggest that he had stood up to or defeated the terrorists rather than competently managed the aftermath of a disaster, didn't gain him any traction six years after the event, and negative stories about his personal life and bad decisions while in office certainly didn't bolster his credentials on leadership, the bedrock on which his campaign was built. In nearly a year of campaigning, Giuliani's approval rating in one poll dropped from 58 percent to 29 percent.
Muzzio says Giuliani's defeat not only spells the end of his political future, but could also put a damper on his hitherto lucrative consulting business.
"His national security bona fides have been called into question," said Muzzio. "Not only by the whole command center incident but the firefighters stalking him and his failure to be on the 9-11 commission because his more important duty was to raise money instead of learning the national security terror field better."
In short, for Rudy Giuliani, it is at long last, 9-12.