Rudy is Out (And Not a Moment Too Soon)

The snake has begun to devour itself. The campaign leading up to the presidential election this November has reached the point when the long-shots and the also-rans face reality and admit defeat. Because of how compressed the primary schedule is this time around, we find ourselves at this point much earlier than usual.

Following the Florida primary this past Tuesday, Democratic candidate John Edwards dropped out, leaving Barack Obama to fight the good fight against what, sadly, still looks like the inevitable nomination of Hillary Clinton. On the other side, the Republican campaign saw the end of by far the most troubling candidacy this time around, that of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who officially ended his campaign following a distant third-place finish in Florida, and endorsed Senator John McCain.

A year ago, Giuliani was the presumptive front-runner for the Republican nomination. He was still thought of as America´s Mayor, the man who had taken a reporter´s microphone and calmly instructed New Yorkers to walk out of Manhattan during the frightening, chaotic hours immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. He epitomized grace under pressure, and leadership in the face of overwhelming tragedy.

Even then, in the halcyon days of the Rudy campaign, I never quite got it. By most reckoning, he had been a reasonably successful mayor of New York, but would anyone have suggested him as a presidential prospect if not for the visibility afforded him by his role following 9/11? Was that really his main qualification, being chief executive of New York City on the day terrorists killed more people on American soil than had ever been killed in one day before?

Rudy certainly seemed to think so. From the start of his campaign last year, he never missed an opportunity to remind us all of his central role in the events of 9/11. More than that—he manufactured opportunities to mention it where none were apparent. When asked about health care, Rudy would bring up the plight of New York´s firefighters and recovery workers, who suffered respiratory ailments as a result of breathing the particle-filled atmosphere enveloping the former site of the Twin Towers. Questioned about immigration, Rudy parroted the pat opinion of his party, that the border should be secured, but hastened to remind us all that the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks had entered the country legally. I remember watching on C-Span a few months ago as he responded to a question about his relationship with his wife by reflecting on how much closer they had grown during the traumatic days after 9/11.

Remember that episode of South Park that parodied Alan Jackson´s song "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?" by showing Jackson performing a song where the only lyric was "9/11" repeated over and over in a schmaltzy melody? That was Rudy Giuliani´s campaign strategy in its entirety.

Besides Rudy´s truly despicable exploitation of 9/11, the strangest aspect of his campaign was the insistence by his supporters that he was best suited among the many candidates to wage the war on terrorism and protect the country from future attacks. I wondered how it was that the man whose only contact with al-Qaeda came on the morning when several of its members crashed hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers in his city, had the credentials to direct an international war on homicidal religious fanatics.

Comedian and radio host Dennis Miller took the suggestion of Giuliani as al-Qaeda´s greatest enemy to a ridiculous extreme, stating repeatedly on his radio show that the only reason he intended to vote for Rudy was because, "On Rudy´s résumé, in that section at the top for ´Last Job,´ it says ´Terrorist Killer.´"

When was Rudy Giuliani ever a terrorist killer? When was he ever a supervisor of terrorist killers? For that matter, when was anyone else running for president? But in the case of Giuliani, who has never played any significant role in national defense or the war on terrorism, the suggestion that the mention of the guy´s name strikes fear in the hearts of terrorists throughout the Middle East is ludicrous.

Giuliani has never killed any terrorists. One thing he has done in the years following September 11, 2001, however, is parlay the exposure he gained that day into an impressive personal fortune, mostly through the private security company, Giuliani Partners, he founded in 2002. Not content to have been made incredibly wealthy by 9/11, Rudy hoped to use the unfathomable tragedy of that day to catapult him all the way to the White House. Thankfully, the campaign of this unprincipled opportunist proved flimsy and poorly managed, and Republican primary voters have sent him home in defeat.

In an election cycle full of suspicious and contemptible characters, especially on the Republican side, Rudy managed to stand out from the pack. He wasn´t the most shallow (that´s Mitt Romney). He wasn´t the craziest (that´s Ron Paul). He wasn´t the scary religious fanatic (that´s Mike Huckabee). He was the ghoul, and I, for one, am glad he´s gone.