Knucklehead: Unless you are Rudolph Giuliani fan (and I know some very smart people who are), here’s a story that will make you chuckle:
— Giuliani ’08 internal campaign memo
It’s clearly laid out in 140 pages of printed text, handwriting and spreadsheets: The top-secret plan for Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the White House.
The remarkably detailed dossier sets out the budgets, schedules and fund-raising plans that will underpin the former New York mayor’s presidential campaign – as well as his aides’ worries that personal and political baggage could scuttle his run…
One page cites the explicit concern that he might “drop out of [the] race” as a consequence of his potentially “insurmountable” personal and political vulnerabilities.
On the same page is a list of the candidate’s central problems in bullet-point form: his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; “social issues,” on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover… “All will come out – in worst light,” the memo continues.
These documents could haunt the campaign later by making it impossible to make Rudi’s personal issues go away via the Bush/Rove method of denying they exist.
Giuliani is the most over-rated would-be president out there. Aside from his spotty mangerial record, his personal history is a mess. Voters in Peoria may forgive him for having gay friends, but may be less forgiving about his marital transgressions, particularly the very public affair he engaged in while he served as mayor of New York, and was very much married to someone else.
