Rudy and Judi make even a libertarian go “ick”

This is incredible. Ryan Sager, a rather callow libertarian columnist for the New York Post and the New York Sun, has been a big Giuliani supporter, dismissing out of hand any notion that Giuliani would not be acceptable to social conservatives, and declaring that the only thing that matters is that Giuliani is a strong leader who can win the election and defend the country from bad guys. The fact that Giuliani has a very questionable personal history and a way-out record as a social liberal doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, Sager confidently assures us. Yet now Giuliani’s stunning behavior in promoting his third wife as a future policy advisor and attendee at Cabinet meetings (discussed by me here), and the crass manner in which Mr. and Mrs. Giuliani keep talking about their Love Affair in public, has pushed even the moraline-free Sager to the Cringe Point. Introducing a video of Judi Giuliani introducing her husband at a fund-raising event this week, Sager writes:

Here, [Mrs. Giuliani] starts off by saying, “I wanted to tell you all a little bit about how Rudy and I came to be our team together.” The problem with this is that we all know their relationship began as an affair, while he was still married—be it in a publicly “distant” (that’s how the press likes to put it) marriage. She then goes on to describe some of their early flirtations.

I don’t think I was the only one at this point thinking: Ick.

The former Ms. Nathan is, after all, describing the beginning of an affair that would lead to an ugly and painful divorce that still is affecting the former mayor’s relationship with his children.

Later in her brief remarks, Mrs. Giuliani describes how being married to the former mayor makes it easier for her to raise money for her chosen causes. “You can then pick up the phone as Judith Giuliani,” she said, and speak to people with deep pockets “who might not normally take my telephone calls.”

Again: Ick.

Here’s the thing. By the time the typical presidential candidate runs for president, he and his wife have been married many years, so that the honeymoon period is long over, the kinks are out of the marriage, and the candidate and his spouse form a smooth-running “team.” Mitt Romney and his beautiful wife are a case in point. But Rudy and Judi are still essentially on their honeymoon, and seem to be driven to keep telling the world (which would rather not know, thank you) how ecstatically ecstatic they are, and Rudy keeps pushing his wife forward in the most inappropriate ways and in the most inappropriate settings to demonstrate his infatuation with her. All of which suggests that the guy is not in a proper frame of mind to be president. Rudy is focussed more on Judi, and on his hypertrophied public ego, than on the job to which he aspires and the country he claims to be ready to lead. This is not the lean and hungry (in the good sense) Giuliani who became mayor of New York City 13 years ago.

Meanwhile Judi, a classically vulgar arriviste, cannot stop telling political audiences of the heady pleasure she derives from her new-found wealth and prominence as the wife of a national political star. If she’s this full of herself over being the wife of “America’s Mayor,” imagine what she would be like as the wife of the president. If ever installed in the White House, this pair would make the Clintons look high-class.

It’s gotten so bad that even John Podhoretz, a strong Rudy supporter whose theme is that only a social liberal like Rudy can defeat Hillary in ‘08, has strongly criticized the Giulianis’ joint interview with Barbara Walters, in which Rudy self-centeredly announced that he was “very, very comfortable” with the prospect of having his wife attend Cabinet meetings. In a column entitled, “The End of Rudy’s Bliss,” Podhoretz writes:

Rudi thought he could say something cute about his wife that really wasn’t cute at all—and seemed perhaps more about currying favor with her than about finding the appropriate balance between portraying a loving marriage and depicting a future presidency.

The worst part of it—and the key to it all of it—is that Rudolph Giuliani lacks the capacity for self-criticism and shame. Whether he’s doing something upright or something despicable, whether he’s refusing to meet with Al Sharpton, or declining to spend time with his own son (because that would interfere with his quality time with Judi); whether he’s kicking Arafat out of Lincoln Center, or trying to kick his second wife and his children out of Gracie Mansion, he’s equally hard-nosed, brutal, and unapologetic. Someone like that could be the mayor of a city. As the President of the United States, he would be a disaster.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 03, 2007 09:37 PM | Send