RUDY GIULIANI WILL BE A ONE-TERM PRESIDENT

I've been asked for a comment on this Giuliani article by Matt Taibbi, which was originally published by Rolling Stone:

Early Wednesday, May 16th, Charleston, South Carolina. The scene is a town-hall meeting staged by GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, only a day after he wowed a patriotic Republican crowd at a nationally televised debate with a righteous ass-kicking of the party's latest Hanoi Jane, terrorist sympathizer Ron Paul. A bump in the polls later, "America's Mayor?" is back on the campaign trail -- in a room packed with standard-issue Adorable Schoolchildren, in this case beatific black kids in elementary school uniforms with wide eyes and big RUDY stickers pinned to their oblivious breasts.

The first thing that occurs to me is that this may be a larger group of African-Americans than Giuliani ever shared a room with when he was mayor of a 50%-nonwhite city. Andrew Kirtzman in The Washington Post:

New York's top-tier elected black leaders -- all of them Democrats -- were written off as sympathizers of Giuliani's predecessor David N. Dinkins; Giuliani refused to meet with any of them for years.

Cintra Wilson in Salon:

In 1999, unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo, mistaken for a rape suspect, was shot 41 times by Safir's Street Crime Unit while he fumbled for his keys at his own doorway.

Giuliani's response was callous. He refused to meet with black leaders for a month -- then again, he pretty much always refused to meet with black leaders.

So I wonder if Giuliani had these kids stopped and frisked first.

More Taibbi:

... all presidential candidates have to play the baby-kissing game, and here is an early chance for Rudy to show his softer side.

"So," he whispers to the kids. "What do you all want to be when you grow up? Do any of you know?"

...'I want to be a policeman!" [a] kid says.

Rudy smiles. Then the next boy says he wants to be a fireman, and the crowd twitters: Wow, a fireman and a policeman, in the same room! Rudy is beaming now, almost certainly aware that every grown-up present is suddenly thinking about 9/11. His day. As he leans over, the room is filled with popping flashbulbs. Then, instead of capitalizing on the sense of pride and shared purpose everyone is feeling, Giuliani utters something truly strange and twisted.

"A fireman and a policeman, huh?" he says. "Well, the first thing that I want to do is make sure that you two get along."

Taibbi thinks this is peculiar, and he's right -- but I'm not sure it's peculiar in quite the way he thinks it is.

Taibbi thinks it's an allusion to the 9/11 Commission's assertion that NYC's police and fire departments were "designed to work independently, not together," with the result that more first responders died on 9/11 than should have. Maybe -- or maybe he's just remembering the best eight years of his life, when the firefighters and cops would butt heads with each other and he'd butt heads with them, all the while calling them stupid.

Either way, yeah, a weird thing to do in a photo op with adorable kids.

The press, which will have a giant man-crush on whomever the GOP nominates, will gloss over this kind of thing if Rudy emerges the nominee, but he's going to have a tough time with it as president. It's not that he can't do warm-and-fuzzy -- but he can do it only if it involves him, his feelings, his wife, his cancer, his experiences on 9/11.

He'll struggle with this as soon as he's in a tough spot as president. He'll fire aides. ("Whaddaya mean you can't me on Oprah again to talk about 9/11? Get outta here, you're history!") The public will sour on him eventually. He'll probably be a one-term president.