Head Strong: What really derailed the bid by Giuliani? Political press

By Michael Smerconish

February  3, 2008

 

Last Monday afternoon, I stood on the tarmac at the Regional Southwest Airport in Fort Myers, Fla., in 80-degree weather, awaiting Rudy Giuliani's arrival on the eve of the Florida primary.

 

Just six hours (and 20 degrees) earlier, I was in literally the same spot awaiting Mitt Romney. It was the perfect vantage point from which to compare and contrast the two GOP candidates.

 

There were differences in their messages, manners of speech, and dress, but the distinction I found most interesting was their mode of transportation. Romney - proclaimed that same morning by a Rasmussen survey as the front-runner - taxied to the podium area in a 50-seat Embraer ERJ 145 airplane. Giuliani arrived in a much larger, chartered Boeing 727. From the rear of his plane departed about two dozen traveling media people, many more than I saw disembark from Romney's aircraft.

 

No doubt they were in tow to write the mayor's presidential obituary. And why not? It was a political passing the Fourth Estate had preordained.

 

Many are disparaging the Giuliani campaign's decision to concentrate on the Sunshine State. Conventional wisdom was that Giuliani would have been better served staying and fighting in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, even in a losing scenario, rather than pulling up stakes and heading South. By this logic, had he continued fighting for support, even from voters to whom he was ill-matched, he would nevertheless have stayed in the national spotlight, reaching the electorate not only in those states, but also throughout the nation, including in Florida. But instinct tells me that more media attention may only have compounded one of his problems - and that is, his relationship with the media.

 

Before voting began in Florida, the Giuliani strategy seemed well-founded. There was no clear front-runner for the Republican nomination, and three candidates had notched victories.

 

So what happened? Rudy Giuliani was treated with enmity by the political press. He was cornered as the "9/11 candidate." And he endured a concerted effort to trash the fiscal and domestic successes he orchestrated in New York before Sept. 11. That treatment proved fatal to his campaign.

 

A case in point: One hour after Giuliani left Fort Myers, DrudgeLines, the ticker for the Drudge Report, featured a news item emblazoned in red amid otherwise black-and-white type: "LA Times: Rudy Giuliani hints at dropping out."

 

The link led to "Top of the Ticket," the political blog for the Los Angeles Times. The posting there hardly merited the headline (the blog's originally) about hints of dropping out. En route to Fort Myers, Giuliani had remarked to the reporters on his plane that "the winner of Florida will win the nomination" and predicted he'd be that winner.

 

The blog called that (the only quote attributed to Giuliani in the piece) "an unusually categorical statement," suggesting that only a victory in Florida would keep him in the race "despite previous vows to continue." But nowhere was any actual "hint," from Giuliani or his campaign staff, attributed or otherwise, of dropping out.

 

Before most Floridians even went to the polls, the political whispers had become deafening with "news" of Giuliani's imminent withdrawal.

 

In truth, the blog was late to a party started long ago by the New York-based media, which migrated to Florida. The worst offender was the New York Times. Consider its rationale for casting aside Giuliani for John McCain in its Jan. 25 editorial endorsing the latter: "The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. . . . Mr. Giuliani's arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking." Strong words, considering this same newspaper endorsed his reelection as mayor in 1997.

 

The New York Times also unleashed a torrent of negative stories about everything from Bernard Kerik to Giuliani's family. Some were founded, but some were not. A pivotal, front-page article alleging that Giuliani hid money for the police guards who participated in his trysts turned out to be incorrect. The subsequent correction was banished to Page 35 of the Dec. 20 national edition of the Times.

 

Even Rupert Murdoch's New York Post - in the personage of Ryan Sager - bypassed burying the hatchet in favor of burying Rudy: "He had his chance and wasted it. The least he can do now is stop wasting our time."

 

And lest you consider mine some half-baked conspiracy theory, consider what Philadelphia Daily News reporter Will Bunch told me this week. Bunch, who covered Giuliani for Newsday in the '90s, said the press attitude toward Giuliani may be "a case of reaping what you sow. He was always hostile toward the press, and yet his supporters complain when human nature kicks in and reporters aren't nice to him. Look at McCain and what he's accomplished with the 100 percent opposite approach to the media."

 

MSNBC's Chris Matthews echoed those sentiments Tuesday night, proclaiming that he never met a member of the media corps who liked Mayor Giuliani. (Matthews did repeatedly question the Times retraction. And on a Jan. 3 show, he asked Giuliani whether he had been "screwed by the press." Giuliani declined to answer.)

 

Today, what's truly breathtaking is the double vision with which some viewed Giuliani's tenure in City Hall. A Dec. 30, 2001, New York Times editorial said that, "with a different mayor, the city would still have done well during the 1990s" - this as Mayor Giuliani prepared to relinquish his chair to Michael Bloomberg. "But without Mr. Giuliani, it might not have undergone the phenomenal turnaround that transformed a city that had been a byword for civic disorder into the emblem of urban renaissance." Then it listed Giuliani's advances in security, sanitation, citizen morale, tourism - and civility.

 

Phenomenal turnaround? Civility?

 

Both emanated from the same man Time magazine deemed the Person of the Year in 2001, whose performance on 9/11 ensured "that he will be remembered as the greatest mayor in the city's history, eclipsing even his hero, Fiorello LaGuardia, who guided Gotham through the Great Depression. Giuliani's eloquence under fire has made him a global symbol of healing and defiance."

 

Those words applied only until Hizzoner ran for president. That's when vindictive media decided to play prophet. And now the greatest mayor in New York's history - America's Mayor - has dropped out of the race, written off before most of the country even had a chance to speak up.

 

Michael Smerconish's column appears Thursdays in the Daily News and Sundays in Currents. He can be heard from 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays on "The Big Talker," WPHT-AM (1210). Contact him via the Web at http://www.mastalk.com.