The Wall Street Journal-20080126-Sunshine Showdown- Giuliani-s Daredevil Strategy Faces a Make-or-Break Test
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Sunshine Showdown: Giuliani's Daredevil Strategy Faces a Make-or-Break Test
YULEE, Fla. -- Rudy Giuliani, in a crisp pinstripe suit, is driven down a bumpy dirt road into the dark woods of a game preserve. Inside its lodge, filled with stuffed bears and deer heads and a group of big-game hunters holding a meeting, he asks: "Did you know I'm running for president?"
It's an unusual question, but Mr. Giuliani is an unusual candidate, with a strategy that has left him barely visible nationally in the early race for the Republican nomination. After largely skipping six state contests, he's pinning his hopes on Florida's vote Tuesday.
As it nears, Mr. Giuliani is falling in polls. He is also running short of cash, so short his staffers are waiving this month's paychecks. Yet in one way, the strategy is on track: GOP rivals beat each other up in the early going without producing a clear front- runner.
Tuesday is likely to produce either a flame-out or a big comeback for the former GOP front-runner, pundits say. Typically, the cocky former New York mayor expresses few doubts. "I feel great about my strategy and support here," he says in an interview. "Nobody has a perfect strategy to this nomination," and soon, "one of us will be a genius and the rest badly mistaken." He said Thursday that he'll stay in the race no matter how Florida comes out.
Yet if Mr. Giuliani seems serene about his path, there also are signs of a scramble within the campaign. After months of stressing his anti-terrorism credentials, Mr. Giuliani has abruptly started talking about the economy. While proclaiming his economic discipline, he is promising plenty of favors for Florida. Top advisers say he must leave Florida "with momentum" to continue raising funds.
His strategy isn't the only thing that makes him an unusual candidate. The tough-talking Mr. Giuliani doesn't radiate the passion seen in warrior-turned-senator John McCain and preacher-turned- governor Mike Huckabee, nor the data-driven business acumen of Mitt Romney. "Rudy is Rudy, a creature of the city," says his state campaign chairman, Bill McCollum. "He's unwilling to say or do anything because it's politically correct."
While that's an overstatement, Mr. Giuliani told the lodge full of hunters "I enforced gun laws in New York City very aggressively," and admitted he wasn't a hunter. He did say he supports the Second Amendment, the one guaranteeing the right to bear arms.
In Miami, the pro-abortion-rights, thrice-married New Yorker appeared before a congregation of evangelical Christians and asked for their prayers. To Hispanics along a parade route in Little Havana, the foe of illegal immigration who insists newcomers learn to "read, write and speak English" grinned and waved, to cheers and boos.
And shortly before the Green Bay Packers' Sunday showdown with the New York Giants, a voter who pushed a Packers cap at Mr. Giuliani to sign found him pushing it back. "No way -- that would be bad luck," he said.
Rather than a full cadre of political operatives, Mr. Giuliani has brought along his buddies, some of them also his business partners, such as boyhood friend Peter Powers, head of his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners LLC. His campaign bus is a macho club on wheels with sports on the TV screens and a supply of cigars. Instead of going for the baby-kissing "photo op," Mr. Giuliani recently rushed past one little boy, who bawled. Only after the boy's grandmother knocked on the bus's door pleading did Mr. Giuliani emerge and sign a brochure. "Thank you, kid," he said.
"Rudy has to be careful not to look like a bully," said Mr. Powers, who added that in fact, what Mr. Giuliani does is stand up to bullies.
"He strikes me as weird," said Donald Croll, a retired engineer who attended a Giuliani rally in Sun City. He frowned at the memory of Mr. Giuliani appearing in drag at a New York event and divorcing his second wife while having an affair with the woman who became his third. Said Mr. Croll: "I've had two wives, but my first one died of cancer."
Since the modern caucus and primary system emerged in the 1970s, no candidate has gotten nominated without facing the rites of passage in Iowa and New Hampshire. "People told Rudy 'you can't win' this way," says his campaign manager, Michael DuHaime. But Mr. Giuliani, after a lifetime of doing the unconventional, is completely comfortable with being unconventional now, both in his personality and his political strategy.
"Rudy will go into the lion's den to take on conventional wisdom on purpose and to great effect," says Fran Reiter, his former deputy mayor, who is supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Contrariness and stubbornness have marked his life and career. When his high-school buddies listened to radio hits, he started an opera club and practiced librettos. As a young federal prosecutor, he went after big targets, such as Mafia bosses, corrupt politicians and white-collar criminals, in unexpected ways, like treating them to "perp walks." He was elected mayor of largely Democratic and liberal New York City in 1993.
Even as he retools a message that had focused heavily on his post- 9/11 leadership, Mr. Giuliani remains the tough talker ready to rumble. "I think the two biggest things that a president can offer are economic security and national security," he told an Orlando audience this week.
Part of his pitch is ways to bring jobs to Florida. In Jacksonville, he said that as president he would station a new aircraft carrier, now under construction, at the nearby naval station. At the Kennedy Space Center, he promises funding to return Americans to the moon and go to Mars. For a state repeatedly threatened by hurricanes, he backs a national catastrophe fund to guarantee certain property-insurance policies.
As for the national economy, "I'm offering the biggest tax cuts of any candidate," he says. He says he would end the estate tax, lower the capital-gains and dividends tax rate to 10% from 15%, cut the corporate rate to 25% and ultimately eliminate the alternative minimum tax.
Mr. Giuliani offers his New York record as Exhibit A. "When I took over a nearly bankrupt city, people gave me a list of tax increases. Do you know what I did with it? I threw it in the garbage. I pushed through 23 tax cuts and it raised revenue!" (He also increased some taxes in New York -- part of what he calls the "negotating process.")
The result, he says in his staccato boom-boom-boom: more businesses and people stayed in New York and spent money there, making its economy vibrant. With a motto in the same staccato style ("Tested. Ready. Now."), Mr. Giulilani challenges voters to "get in a taxi in New York and ask about me! Visit New York. You can walk in Times Square again!" He offers tour-guide advice on what to see: a Broadway play, perhaps "Wicked," and a museum, perhaps MoMA, which in his Brooklyn accent he pronounces "Momer."
Mr. Giuliani isn't shy about taking credit for it all: "I fixed New York!" For this state packed with New York transplants and retirees, "he's the man," says one former New Yorker, Nancy Santiago. A retiree in Sun City, Patty Eckart, says: "He's stood up to the Mob and the terrorists. He has the guts to stand up to anybody."
But some find him jarring. Dianne Bayer, a Tarpon Springs nurse who attended a rally at which Mr. Giuliani hit hard with his anti-tax and anti-terrorist themes, says, "He's so tough that enemies of the United States wouldn't want to go up against him, but that doesn't mean I'll be for him."
From the start, Mr. Giuliani identified Florida as his best shot at winning an early state contest because it most resembled the diversity of his native New York. The plan was to take Florida at the end of January and surge just in time for Super Tuesday Feb. 5, with primaries in delegate-rich states such as New York, New Jersey and California.
Yet as losses piled up in states he didn't contest, Mr. Giuliani, who was an early front-runner partly on the advantage of name recognition, fell in national polls. Lately he has lost ground in Florida, too.
He was hurt by the corruption indictment of Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner and business partner, and by reports of security spending early in his relationship with Judith Nathan, who's now his wife. A nationwide Wall Street Journal/NBC poll ranks Mr. Giuliani fourth among Republicans. Recent polls in Florida have him in third or tied for third, behind Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney.
Asked at a Thursday debate about his sunken poll standing, Mr. Giuliani likened himself to the Super Bowl-bound New York Giants, saying he was going to come from behind and surprise everyone. Of his competitors, he said, "We have them all lulled into a very false sense of security." His campaign contends that many absentee votes were cast for Mr. Giuliani while his rivals weren't yet very active in the state.
A new campaign theme song blares at every appearance. It's from a 1993 movie called "Rudy," about an undersize football player who works hard to get onto Notre Dame's team. He sits on the sidelines all through a game but gets in on the last play and is carried off the field in victory. "We kind of like that analogy," says Mr. DuHaime.
Although some advisers fretted about the strategy of skipping early contests, Mr. Giuliani cut them off. "No second guessing," he told them.
He has tried, not always successfully, to soften his take-no- prisoners demeanor. In a debate two months ago, when Mr. Romney accused him of giving sanctuary to illegal immigrants in New York, Mr. Giuliani was ready with a zinger. "You have a sanctuary mansion," he said, alluding to a landscaping crew Mr. Romney once used that included illegals. Fired up, Mr. Giuliani used the line a second time.
After the debate, he fumed about his performance, say two advisers. "He was mad at himself" for displaying irritation, says one adviser.
The temper flashed again in Jacksonville. At a veterans' memorial, he strode to the podium amid blaring music and waving flags. He recognized dignatories, then audience members who'd lost family members in Iraq. "Come up here," he commanded one mother. "I want his name known by everybody." As Carolyn Woods began by telling how "a sniper killed my 22-year-old son," she was interrupted by an anti- abortion protester yelling "Rudy kills innocent children."
Mr. Giuliani's tender demeanor turned to ire at the protester, whom bodyguards and local police chased away. The crowd was taken aback by the drama, but the mayor who smacked down "squeegee guys" who used to hassle drivers at New York stoplights was unfazed. "Go on," he told the mother. "Don't let him bother you."
At a stop in a strip mall, he jumped on a makeshift stage in front of his bus. When his microphone didn't work, he tried yelling to the mostly elderly folks who gathered. Al Geiger, adjusting his hearing aid, whispered to his wife about leaving to catch an early movie. At that moment, the mike came on, and Mr. Giuliani's voice was so loud he seemed to be screaming as he said, "I can handle whatever the terrorists, or catastrophes, throw at us."
At most campaign stops, he slips in a back door and waits behind a blue curtain while someone warms up the crowd. On two recent days it was actor Jon Voight, who talked about his movies and how bad he said New York City was before Mr. Giuliani became mayor.
Mr. McCollum, his Florida chairman, who is also state attorney general, often senses that Mr. Giuliani needs to reach out to voters more. Because of both security concerns and Mr. Giuliani's style, he often avoids pressing the flesh. But at several recent stops, Mr. McCollum literally pushed him in among the people, telling him, "Get into the crowd."
As Mr. Giuliani shook hands with people at a Tampa restaurant, one of them, Tony DiMatteo, the Republican Party chairman for Pinellas County, started to talk to him. Mr. Giuliani walked away without even looking at him. Afterward, Mr. DiMatteo said, "That's OK, I've met him before."
After each event, Mr. Giuliani rushes onto his campaign bus. "We're bonding on the bus," says Mr. Peters, his longtime pal. "It's relaxing for him." At night, he writes notes and speeches and reads books, currently "Legacy of Ashes," a history of the Central Intelligence Agency. He sleeps only about four hours a night, both he and his wife, Judith, say. Though Mr. Giuliani says he thinks he can win Florida, he adds that "I don't worry about what I can't control."
"If Rudy didn't believe he would be the best president of this country, he wouldn't be doing all this," says Judith, as her husband glances at his watch. "Last night he was lying in bed reading a book. He's at peace."
