True, there are dreadful omens to be found in Rudy Giuliani's third-place finish in the Florida primary. It's possible reactionary Republican voters rejected his relatively liberal social policies, ran in fear of his ethnicity and his big-city ways, demanding someone more whitebread, more fire-and brimstone, more likely to punish the disbelievers.
Given all that, I'm thrilled by Giuliani's loss.
The guy was, is and will always be a slimeball. He made his name as a prosecutor by going after high-profile mobsters, all the while tolerating and even encouraging corruption in his personal doings. As mayor, he "cleaned up" New York City by cracking down on civil liberties, evincing outright hostility to the poor and the homeless. Under his reign, cops were treated as royalty no matter how outrageous or illegal their behavior, but hey, why not, since Giuliani used the NYPD as his personal security force, put to work escorting friends and mistresses on their rounds rather than, say, catching criminals. His sense of entitlement, his obvious belief that the city's entire infrastructure existed only to support his lifestyle, repulsed even the heartiest veterans of New York politics.
Then, of course, 9/11.
Give Giuliani credit, I guess, for being there on the ground, while Bush and Cheney stayed away, trembling like bunnies. In the days and weeks following the attacks, the press couldn't get enough of St. Rudy, "America's Mayor", the tough-talking face of all that was good about our nation. True, he pushed the relief workers at Ground Zero past acceptable human limits, endangering their health and slashing their benefits later, but no one wanted to hear that.
He took his canonization in the press as some kind of mandate, willingly calling himself Mr. 9/11, building his entire reputation on the bodies of the dead. Even the most devout believers in St. Rudy, those awestruck by his competence during those dreadful but long-past days in that terrible September, couldn't help being repulsed by the man's willingness to make a personal hay from a national tragedy. Once he started inserting the words "nine eleven" into pretty much every sentence he uttered publicly, he managed to turn the very memory of the day into a sick joke.
His presidential campaign displayed all the arrogance we've come to expect from the man, and had he been elected, it would have been a disaster. We're already enduring Bush's imperial presidency; Giuliani would have set himself up as a god.
