Anger Issues Could Become Campaign Issues for Both GOP Frontrunners

Mayor Giuliani was so “mean and thin-skinned” he made criticizing him a criminal offense. A GOP pol has called McCain a “vicious person.”

Campaigning for president is above all else an exhausting experience. The 2008 campaign will be the longest on record — it is underway now, and will ramp up in intensity over the next 21 months.

When people get tired, they get cranky, and crankiness can make them mean. For the two leading Republicans — former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Sen. John McCain — exhaustion could prove to be perilous. Both men, even fully rested, are meaner than most.

Competency will be a threshold qualification in 2008, for obvious reasons. To give Giuliani and McCain their due — unlike George W. Bush in 2000 — both men have long and successful, though not unblemished, careers in public service.

But our Bush-fatigued nation will also be looking for a leader who has a calm, even-tempered demeanor and who can roll with the punches — someone who is emotionally mature. The challenge facing these two tantrum-prone hotheads is that in the heat of the campaign even a small outburst of temper can quash a candidacy, sending it from top of the heap to limping toward last place within the course of a news cycle or two.

“It goes to temperament,” the pundits will say, which means, “We can’t have a hothead with his finger on the nuclear trigger.”

Based on their past performances, it is more than likely that “temperament” will become a deciding issue for both Giuliani and McCain.

Rudy: America’s Ex-Husband

If you’d asked most New Yorkers on Sept. 10, 2001, what they thought of their mayor, hardly anyone would have had anything nice to say about Rudolph Giuliani’s temperament. His second and final term was winding down and, though he had turned the city around on crime and in other areas, voters were tired of him. The attacks the next day changed all that, as we will no doubt be reminded a few times by the Giuliani campaign over the coming months.

Still, a lot of New Yorkers, including Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter remember the old pre-9/11 Rudy:

There’s reference to his poor relations with the black community and his mishandling of the 1999 Amadou Diallo case, in which police fired 41 shots at an unarmed African immigrant. The truth is, Al Sharpton was hardly alone in his contempt for Giuliani. Most New Yorkers were horrified, not by his defense of the police, but by the arrogant and astonishingly tone-deaf way in which he handled himself. His ridiculously thin skin and mile-wide mean streak were not allegations made by whiners and political opponents. They were traits widely known to his supporters

And there is Giuliani’s pettiness. As a former prosecutor, he made reducing crime a priority. He was largely successful but he had some help. During the same period, crime rates went down across the country — plus he had a strong and effective chief of police, Bill Bratton (who currently heads the LAPD):

In 1996, Bratton’s face appeared on the cover of Time. Giuliani got rid of him. He also, apparently, initiated an investigation into whether a Bratton book deal constituted a conflict of interest. It was speculated that Rudy fired the man many called the nation’s best police chief because he was, simply, insanely jealous.

To replace Bratton, Giuliani brought in Howard Safir — a move that alienated the remaining players on Team Bratton, particularly Bratton’s No. 2 man, John Timoney. When a visibly dismayed Timoney referred to Safir as a “lightweight,” Giuliani, in a move that would set the tone for his zero-tolerance policy toward dissent, first tried to demote Timoney to captain, then forced Timoney out of office, ordering him to take a leave of absence until his retirement.

In 2000, the mayor’s response to the killing of an innocent man, Patrick Dorismond, in a scuffle with an NYPD undercover officer created a storm of controversy:

In the outcry following Dorismond’s death, Giuliani was snide and unapologetic. He released Dorismond’s juvenile records to justify Dorismond’s homicide eight years later. He also, famously, sneered that Dorismond was “no altar boy” and defended his comments with a breathlessly cynical legalism, saying it was impossible to libel the dead.

A poll taken immediately after the Dorismond incident showed that only 16 percent of New Yorkers approved of this response from their mayor.

And then there is his authoritarian streak, which may make the current White House neo-fascist gang look like a bunch of ALCUers:

[In 1997] Giuliani officially adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward any and all criticism and satire aimed at himself. He had the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority remove an ad for New York magazine from city buses that joked that the magazine was “Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.” A U.S. District Court judge slapped Rudy down for his inability to take a joke or tolerate the First Amendment; the ban was lifted. But this only seemed to encourage him even further in his delusion of being Warrior Christ of the Apocalypse-elect.

His public behavior toward his wife at the end of his marriage was atrocious:

In May of 2000, the New York Daily News broke news of his relationship to Judith Nathan, and Giuliani then called a press conference to announce that he intended to separate from Donna Hanover. Hanover, however, had apparently not been told about his plans before his press conference.

Yes, his wife — a newscaster — learned that Rudy was leaving her when he announced it on television.

He may be “America’s Mayor” in some quarters, but when women voters get to know his domestic record, he may become known as “America’s Ex-Husband.”

McCain: Second Hottest Temper in the Senate

NewsMax, a rightwing news site, has covered McCain’s record of tantrums extensively:

[McCain has few supporters in the Senate.]In fact, when McCain ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000, only four Republican senators endorsed him.

“I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues,” said former Senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who served with McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee and on Republican policy committees. “He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We’ve all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I’ve never seen anyone act like that.”

An anonymous former senator recalls McCain having a meltdown in a room full of his colleagues:

“McCain used the f-word,” the former senator said. “McCain called the guy a ‘sh–head.’ The senator demanded an apology. McCain stood up and said, ‘I apologize, but you’re still a sh–head.’ That was in front of 40 to 50 Republican senators. That sort of thing happened frequently.”

The NewsMax article also suggests that the public has been kept in the dark about McCain’s true nature by — I guess — the liberal media:

“A presidential candidate is not supposed to talk at length and on the record about the rules he broke or the strippers he dated, or the time he arrived so drunk that he fell through the screen door of the young lady he was wooing,” Time wrote in a Dec. 13, 1999 profile of McCain. “The candor tells you more than the comment, and reporters sometimes just decide to take him off the record because they don’t want to see him flame out and burn up a great story.”

According to NewsMax, a Republican congressman describes McCain as “a vicious person.” And last summer, a Washingtonian magazine survey of Capitol Hill staffers named McCain the second “Hottest Temper in the Senate.” (Voters said Sen. Ted “Bridge to Nowhere/Internet Runs in Tubes” Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, had the hottest temper.)

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In the 2004 race, the infamous scream that led to Howard Dean’s flaming out was not an angry moment at all. He was cheerleading at a campaign rally. Nonetheless, Dean dropped from frontrunner to also-ran within days.

As Giuliani and McCain embark on the 2008 race, they are entering a marathon that’s course leads them across an emotional minefield. With one false move, their tempers, and their campaigns, could both explode.

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