When Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid, which rose out of the shattered glass of 9/11, ended tonight with the whimper of a concession speech, it wasn’t just the latest twist in the ever-more-intriguing 2008 presidential campaign. It was a victory for America and American politics. By brushing off a candidate who would have emulated President Bush’s authoritarian tendencies and myopia-fueled incompetence, American voters dealt a serious blow to—and hopefully ended—one of the uglier eras in American politics.

Until recently, Giuliani was the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination. He enjoyed double-digit leads through the summer, with his support peaking in August. By late fall he was still seen as the clear favorite for the nod. “I don’t believe this can be taken from us,” a senior Giuliani advisor told The New York Observer in November.

But then came what The New York Times summed up as “a free fall so precipitous as to be breathtaking.” The thud came with Giuliani’s third-place finish in the Florida primaries, which spelled doom for a candidate who had decided to put most of his resources toward winning the Sunshine State’s 57 delegates. So what happened? The Times posits that the “more that Republican voters saw of him, the less they wanted to vote for him.” This has a lot to do with it; Giuliani, for most of his campaign, was able to live a strange dichotomy. On the one hand was post-9/11 Rudy, who could travel the country, endlessly invoke that day (former presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del, famously quipped that “there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11”), and get easy praise from a public still transfixed by images of Rudy atop the rubble. On the other hand was the real Rudy—a vicious politician who managed to piss off half of New York, and who never would have gotten near the Oval Office had 9/11 not given birth to his more camera-friendly, grinning counterpart.

It was only a matter of time before voters became acquainted with the real Rudy. And once they did, they were far less likely to forgive his transgressions against orthodox conservatism. Rudy was done in, in part, by the same thing that propelled him to prominence: New York’s status as the media capital of the world.

“There’s no politician more fun to write about than Rudy Giuliani,” wrote Michael Wolff in the June 2007 Vanity Fair. “He’s your political show of shows—driven to ever greater public outlandishness by a do-anything compulsion always to be at the center of attention.” Over the past two years, a swarm of journalists, many of them New York-based, has taken on the Giuliani legacy and how he conducted himself while in office. Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice wrote an extensive, in-depth account of “Rudy Giuliani’s Five Big Lies About 9/11” that thoroughly debunked the notion of Giuliani as a disaster-preparedness guru; Kevin Baker described a Giuliani presidency as a “fate worse than Bush” (subs. req.) in Harper’s; and Rachel Morris wrote in the Washington Monthly that Giuliani was the candidate “most likely to not only embrace the [extra-constitutional] powers that Bush has claimed, but to seize more.” (Soft Skull Press even released a book devoted to Giuliani muckraking.) These journalists, and numerous others, all came to the same conclusion: that Giuliani’s need for the spotlight, his appetite for power, and his obsession with loyalty made him unfit to govern.

There was something circus-like in all this coverage. Some journalists derived pleasure from covering Giuliani not because of weighty constitutional issues, but because of the three marriages, the children who don’t speak to him, the cross-dressing. That’s fine, and certainly entertaining, but it sometimes overshadowed how dangerous a president Giuliani could have been.

Make no mistake: The U.S. dodged a bullet. A Giuliani presidency, had it come about, would have breathed new life into all of the most dreadful, deleterious aspects of Bush’s tenure. Giuliani’s failings closely mirror Bush’s, and in many cases are more pronounced.

Just as Bush has set up an echo chamber where he is only exposed to those with whom he agrees, Giuliani, too, saw obsequious loyalty as the end-all, be-all of his subordinates’ effectiveness. The “Yesrudys” responded in turn by attempting to “outdo each other in proving their fanatical loyalty,” according to Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. (The Times suggested that this could be part of the reason his campaign unraveled, noting that Giuliani “allowed a tight coterie of New York aides, none with national political experience, to run much of his campaign.”)

And just as Bush had no compunctions about transforming every part of the federal government into yet another arm of his political machine, Giuliani used New York City’s resources to do everything from illegally undermining the reputation of an unarmed victim of a police shooting to sending city police to arrest someone who had publicly embarrassed him.

These examples don’t even touch on Giuliani’s more run-of-the-mill scandals, like his tendency to bill city agencies for trips to see his then-mistress, or his close relationship with Bernie Kerik, one of the most corrupt public officials in recent memory. All of these flaws would have led to an administration just as committed to secrecy and close-minded, ideological decision-making—if not more so—than Bush’s. As Morris put it, the “Bush administration has walked a considerable length” toward subverting the rule of law, but “Giuliani, were he to be elected president, would set off running.”

The scariest parallel between Giuliani and Bush, however, had to do with foreign policy. Since Giuliani’s only shot at the presidency was to mercilessly milk 9/11 and his tough-guy image, his proposed foreign policy carried on the Bush legacy of shortsighted interventionism and complete misunderstanding of the roots of terrorism. The two most glaring examples were in his appointment of Norman Podhoretz as a senior foreign-policy advisor to his campaign, and in his article in Foreign Affairs laying out his vision for American foreign policy.

Podhoretz is, in short, one of the loudest, least intelligent neoconservatives there is. He was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century’s Statement of Principles in 1997. PNAC advocated for war with Iraq from the time of its founding, and its members and allies are a veritable who’s-who of influential neoconservative Bush administration officials and advisors. But despite the fact that Podhoretz cheered on the prospect of war with Iraq, he didn’t bother to acquaint himself with even the most basic facts about the nation and its people. In 2003, he asked Middle East reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” after Goldberg gave a talk about Kurdistan.

This pernicious combination—a heartfelt eagerness for battle laid atop an utter lack of intellectual curiosity about the intricacies of foreign policy—doomed the Bush presidency, shamed the neoconservative movement, and brought about an identity crisis regarding America’s role in the world that could take decades to sort itself out. And yet Giuliani chose Podhoretz, who exemplifies these flaws like few other public figures, to lead his foreign-policy brigade.

Giuliani’s dangerous foreign-policy incompetence was on further display in his Foreign Affairs piece. The magazine asked all the major presidential candidates to write foreign-policy manifestos, and Giuliani’s was met with immediate ridicule from across the political spectrum. A conservative blogger on Outside the Beltway wrote, “Essentially, he wants to massively increase a defense budget that already spends more than the rest of the countries on the planet combined so as to buy more submarines and anti-missile systems to protect us against a land-based guerrilla movement” (emphasis his). Daniel Drezner, a blogger and foreign-policy expert, chided Giuliani’s piece as “an unbelievably unserious essay.” And Matthew Yglesias, a left-leaning blogger and associate editor at The Atlantic, described Giuliani’s manifesto as a “chilling vision of a world where peace can only be achieved through American military domination. Giuliani disparages the UN harshly, and puts forward no vision for reforming it. He wants to transform NATO from a geographically limited defensive alliance into some kind of globe-spanning UN substitute—a sort of formalized coalition of the willing.”

Like Bush, Giuliani put infinite faith in the United States’ ability to defend itself from terrorism through the sheer strength of its military. As the past few years have shown, large-scale military actions by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq have led to an increase in terrorism in those countries and worldwide, and yet Giuliani clung to the faded neoconservative notion that aggressive international intervention goes hand-in-hand with counterterrorism efforts.

He is only one candidate, but hopefully Giuliani’s downfall signals the end of a style of politics developed and perfected by Bush and his political advisors. This style relies on a narrative in which America is surrounded—and infested—by enemies, and could be vaporized at any moment. It’s a terrifying world, one in which brute force is the only appropriate countermeasure and where security concerns are so pressing that they are the singular prerequisite for a political candidate. Americans have largely turned against this worldview—they now rate several concerns ahead of terrorism and seem less receptive to the endless fear-mongering that has been so politically effective in recent years. And by turning back Giuliani, they have taken a step toward a more reasonable, cool-headed brand of politics.

Jesse Singal is an Associate Editor at Campus Progress.

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Comments

1. 9/11 has been replaced with the “surge”. The media is backing it 100 percent and not fully reporting what’s going on there. McCain and Hillary are winning because they support it and those who don’t are being attacked on it.

   These kinds of politics are here and won’t go away. They just change names. Please use your brain and vote for an intelligent person.

   — sadcomment - Jan 30, 09:39 PM - #