Rudy's Return?

One of the greatest joys of the 2008 presidential campaign was writing about the hilarious decline and fall of Rudolph Giuliani. Watching Rudy go from being the prohibitive front-runner to becoming the guy who spent even more money for a single delegate than John Connally was a thing of beauty and not something I'll soon forget.

I was always doubtful that Giuliani could win the nomination, if only because that's not how the Republican primaries work. The next guy in line almost always gets the nod. The only exceptions to that rule since the Age of Eisenhower were Nelson Rockefeller and Steve Forbes. McCain was the next guy in line and he would have had to do something truly brutal and chilling to lose. But Rudy thought he could be nominated, which was the most adorable thing on earth.

Most journalists are little more than amateur revisionist historians, so I'm not at all surprised that they're peddling the moronic narrative that Giuliani lost two years ago because of his liberal-libertarian social positions. That's almost laughably false. Hizzoner repudiated his firmly held beliefs on social issues years earlier, when he thought it could get him elected president. Rudy lost because he's an idiot and didn't think that the rules of politics applied to him.

The Giuliani campaign would dump a few million dollars into Iowa or New Hampshire, and when the polls didn't immediately go into the stratosphere, they abandoned the state. That's no way to win the delegates you need for a nomination. Rudy then made his last stand in the impossibly late Florida primary and was promptly stabbed in the back by Governor Charlie Crist, killing him off once and for all.

Or not. You see, The Hill has a staggering stupid article online suggesting that Giuliani could be a force in 2012 contest.

As a 2008 primary front-runner, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani tanked. But as a 2012 dark horse, he could do surprisingly well.

It’s not because Giuliani has shifted; it’s because the Republican Party has. The 2010 election was less about social conservatism than it was fiscal conservatism, and that aligns with Giuliani’s socially moderate and fiscally conservative ideology.

That would be a great, but it's based on a fundamentally flawed premise. The former mayor had his ass handed to him because his campaign sucked, not because of any stands on the issues that he took. In fact, Christian Haize's article makes a much stronger case for a Romney candidacy than it does a Giuliani one.

More importantly, the GOP hasn't changed. There have been any number of recent polls that show that the Tea Party base self-identifies as Christian conservatives more than anything else. They just chose not to campaign on social issues because, in this economic climate, they would look silly doing so.

And I don't expect that to change in two years because I'm of the opinion that the United States is in a structural recession. Unemployment might drop to nine percent, but that isn't going to make a difference as a political matter. Barring a disastrous terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 (which, frankly, isn't likely), the economy isn't going to be the big issue, it's going to be the only issue. Terrorism and the war were barely mentioned in the '08 general election, not at all this year, and I don't expect that to change two years from now.

Make no mistake, Rudy is stuffed with enough crazed hubris to run. The only problem is that nobody in their right mind is going to give to him money. Serious Republican donors are going to look for whoever they think has the best shot at beating Obama (which none of them realistically do) and dump all their money there. The guy who thought becoming the King of Florida was a pathway to being elected president of the United States is not going to get anywhere near Obama.

More importantly, there's no evidence that Giuliani has been building a national organization or visiting key early states, like Iowa, where Mike Huckabee practically lives. Like Sarah Palin, Rudy hasn't signed up any of the campaign talent that you need to be taken seriously.

In my opinion, Giuliani is keeping his name out there as a possible "white knight" that will jump in late if there's no clear frontrunner that polls decently against President Obama. Right now speculation about Palin is sucking the oxygen out of the room. When she announces that she isn't running, the picture might change. But it won't change in Giuliani's favor. The reason that no one runs on a white knight strategy is because it hasn't worked since Wendell Willkie pulled it off in 1940.