Giuliani Under Fire: How to deflect uncomfortable questions? It might help to talk publicly about policy
By John H. Fund
jewishworldreview.com | PALM BEACH, Fla.— The contrast was jarring. Rudy Giuliani had just finished what was by all accounts a well-received speech to the Club for Growth, a free-market group, at a posh resort here. But at the insistence of his campaign, all of his remarks were off the record. That meant that almost all the questions that Mr. Giuliani had to answer at the news conference he called afterward concerned his relationship with Bernie Kerik, his former New York City police commissioner and business partner.
The Washington Post reports that prosecutors have told Mr. Kerik they are preparing to charge him with filing false information to the government in connection with his failed nomination as President Bush's secretary of homeland security in 2004. Mayor Giuliani was briefed about Mr. Kerik's potential ties to organized crime before hiring him as police commissioner in 2000, and the former mayor subsequently served as Mr. Kerik's cheerleader with the White House. Mr. Giuliani told a grand jury last year that he must have simply forgotten the 2000 briefings. Mr. Kerik may also face charges related to tax evasion and conspiracy to commit wiretapping, according to the Post.
At Mr. Giuliani's press briefing, I attempted several times to ask a question about economic policy but was swept away by a wave of inquiries about Mr. Kerik.
"I think I should have done a better job of investigating him, vetting him," a slightly startled Mr. Giuliani told reporters. "People have a right to question my judgment," he said when asked whether his ties with Mr. Kerik could hurt his campaign. "They have a right to question everything about me. And then they have to look at the things I've done that are successful, the things they think that I've done right, and the mistakes they think I've made."
A good answer, but reporters who were present took it as his acknowledgement that the media honeymoon that has allowed Rudy Giuliani to rocket to the front of the crowded Republican primary field is over.
Mr. Giuliani is in no legal jeopardy over his ties with Mr. Kerik, but their close relationship underscores how much Mr. Giuliani has traditionally placed his trust in a small group of advisers to whom he has shown great loyalty—a practice that is now universally acknowledged to have served President Bush poorly. For their part, some Giuliani appointees report that while the mayor's insistence on accountability helped kick a sluggish New York bureaucracy into gear, it often verged on the dictatorial. "Rudy was a great mayor," New York Times columnist David Brooks, a Giuliani fan, said recently. "But there is absolutely no way he could bring his management style and practices to Washington, D.C. He'd have to change them."
The man Oprah Winfrey dubbed "America's Mayor" will even have to face querulous criticism about his leadership leading up to and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The federal commission investigating the attacks noted the firemen at the World Trade Center were using the same primitive radios used by the first responders to the 1993 terrorist bombing of the site. "When he runs on 9/11, I want the American people to know he was part of the problem," Sally Regenhard, the mother of a fireman who died on 9/11, told the Associated Press last week. At a 2004 hearing of the 9/11 Commission, she screamed at Mr. Giuliani, "My son was murdered because of your incompetence!"
Such criticism is misplaced and unlikely to resonate with voters, who admire the mayor's Churchillian response to the terrorist attacks. Few will demand to know why the head of a sprawling city bureaucracy failed to micromanage the purchase of communications technology. Still, you can expect the International Association of Fire Fighters, which clashed repeatedly with Mr. Giuliani over salary and benefit issues during his tenure as mayor, to make his 9/11 performance an issue. The union has vowed to tell "the real story" of Mr. Giuliani's handling of 9/11.
Meanwhile, Mr. Giuliani moved swiftly last week to head off potential damage from an interview he and his wife, Judith, conducted with ABC's Barbara Walters. He told Ms. Walters that he's open to having his wife attend cabinet meetings. "If she wanted to, if they were relevant to something that she was interested in, I mean that would be something that I'd be very, very comfortable with," Mr. Giuliani said.
The comments immediately stirred up a flurry of Internet speculation that Judith Giuliani, a registered nurse, would follow the first-lady model Hillary Clinton set when she tried to remake America's health-care system, which represents one-seventh of the nation's economy. Mr. Giuliani insisted his remarks "were taken out of context" and that his wife "does not have overriding interest in many, many of the policy areas." But the incident highlighted the danger the Giuliani campaign has that reporters bored with policy issues will zero in on the complicated personal story of Mr. Giuliani and his wife. "I suspect this may just be part II of a saga (that is, the saga of Judy causing problems for Rudy) that will have many more parts to come," writes Ryan Sager, a New York Sun columnist who is sympathetic to the former mayor.
All of these obstacles are surmountable. Mr. Giuliani has an impressive story to tell about New York's renewal, and his campaign clearly wants to broaden his appeal beyond his image as a strong and decisive leader in a time of crisis. This week Team Rudy began running radio ads in Atlanta in which Mr. Giuliani announces that his "campaign is about leadership and optimism." He then segues into how the nation "needs supply-side policies and reduced government spending . . . fiscal discipline to keep the economy growing."
At his appearance before the Club for Growth, Mr. Giuliani showed an impressive command of facts and a clear understanding of how tax cuts are a vital component of economic growth. "I was impressed," Louis Woodhill, an investor from Houston, told me afterwards. But the Giuliani campaign wasn't self-confident enough to open the speech up so reporters could see for themselves how Mr. Giuliani smoothly handled questions about free trade and a federal court's recent decision upholding the Constitutional right of citizens to own guns. The faster the Giuliani campaign unwraps their man, the easier it will be for them to overcome questions about pals like Bernie Kerik and his hyperaggressive management style.
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