The Giuliani Tourist Trap

"[Florida] is a state of full of mothers who live for phone calls from long-distance adult children... ."

Timothy Egan, Jan. 24, 2008

Timothy Egan, 2006 National Book Award winner for his historical treatment of the Great Dust Bowl, today is blogging for the New York Times. Summarizing Rudy Giuliani's imploding Florida campaign, he uses a memorably snarky headline to foretell the conclusion: "Goodbye Rudy, Tuesday."

[Y]ou can summarize Giuliani’s problems in the line he no longer uses. When the World Trade Center towers came down, he turned to his loyal sidekick Bernie Kerik, and said he was glad George Bush was president.

Now, that line is a triple loser. Kerik, his police commissioner, is under federal indictment, in a sea of troubles. Bush is despised by two-thirds of Americans, and even a majority of Republicans want to go in a different direction.
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Yet Giuliani still wants to frighten people into voting for him. Maybe that’s why he hired the gothic-faced actor Jon Voight to stump for him in Florida. What, Christopher Walken wasn’t available?

There is no doubt that Giuliani's unpopularity in Florida is snowballing. The Miami Herald reports his poll numbers have sunk to Huckabee levels, just above "Undecided" and the campaign corpse known as "Fred Thompson." The odd thing is that Egan attributes this to Giuliani's estrangement from his children rather than to the ex-mayor's hateful, retributive personality.

"This is a state of full of mothers who live for phone calls from long-distance adult children," Egan writes, "and there’s one thing they can’t abide – Rudy’s wreck of a family life."

Yes, people roll their eyes over the story of how Giuliani’s third wife picked him up in a cigar bar while he was still married to the second Mrs. Hizzoner. But I heard no end of condemnation over the mayor’s estrangement from his two children.

Another Times reporter, Michael Powell, probably has it right: Giuliani is hitting it off with the sight-seeing snowbirds, but not with voters who actually live in Florida. He's become a scary kind of tourist trap -- sort of like St. Augustine's Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum -- not a serious candidate for what we used to call "leader of the free world."