Giuliani backer starts to see the Giuliani Problem

John Podhoretz, a passionate and now suddenly worried supporter of Rudolph Giuliani for president, essentially echoes what I’ve been saying for the last several months: Giuliani is no longer the focused, sometimes disconcertingly intense figure he was when he ran New York City, driven to do the best job he could do. As Podhoretz puts it, the Rudy of 2007 seems lazy, he’s winging it, he’s answering important policy questions without adequate preparation and making a hash of things—the opposite of his impressive and tightly-wound performance as mayor of which Podhoretz speaks in star-struck awe.

Podhoretz doesn’t suggest a reason for this alteration of behavior on Giuliani’s part, but I do: Giuliani since leaving office at the beginning of 2001 has changed from the lean and hungry civic reformer he once was into a gross ego-balloon of a celebrity, attached at the hip to his grasping third wife with whom he’s infatuated and to whom he is evidently in thrall. His candidacy thus seems to be about Rudy and Judi and their drama rather than about the country and how he would lead it.

If a major Giuliani fan like Podhoretz can see how off-key Giuliani is, others will start to see it too. The man is no more suited to be president of the United States than, say, Howard Dean was in 2004, though for somewhat different reasons.

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A reader writes:

Terrific remarks about Giuliani, you really have his number and the way he’s acting these days.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 12, 2007 11:23 AM | Send