The Giuliani Papers

Giuliani Back on the Paid Speakers Circuit

Rudy is back on the road trying to make some money speaking to people who one supposes didn't hear him for free on his failed campaign for the presidency.

The Washington Speakers Bureau has his current listing:

The concluding pitch on what paying audiences will get:

Giuliani delivers practical tips and insights while sharing stories that demonstrate how the obstacles we overcome strengthen us for the challenges that lie ahead. Giuliani discusses the shows leaders at all levels how to transform their corporate and organizational cultures—for bottom-line success and results.

The site lists only a range of possible fees charged and does not give Rudy's level number. It is assumed he'd be a #6, unless his failure to achieve "bottom-line success and results" in his most recent endeavors has bumped him back to a level 1 or 2:

1 = $1,000 - $7,500
2 = $7,501 - $10,000
3 = 10,001 - $15,000
4 = 15,001 - $25,000
5 = 25,001 - $40,000
6 = 40,001 & UP

Giuliani Campaign Foreign Policy Advisor Hill Blames the New York Times for Rudy's Defeat

Giuliani was just too damn nice. That's why he couldn't get people to vote for him and spent $40 million on one delegate. So says Charles Hill of Yale, Iraq warmonger and well-known neo-con and Rudy's chief foreign policy advisor in an interview in the Yale Daily News:

One of Giuliani’s problems, Hill said, was that he ran such a clean, positive campaign.

“He refused to be negative,” remarked the Studies in Grand Strategy professor.

Hill reserved his harshest criticism for the Times — “a never-ceasing slander machine,” he called it — but he admitted the paper succeeded where the Giuliani campaign did not.

“The communications strategy of the Times was far better than ours,” he said.

He criticized the paper for running what he described as stock feature stories looking back at and “denouncing” the mayor’s past — and using them in such a way that they seemed like news, even though Hill said they had no relevance to the current moment.

Wayne Barrett on Giuliani's Political Demise

The journalist who knows more about Rudy than anyone exposes the final lies of the Giuliani campaign:

Giuliani claimed last week that he'd run an "uplifting campaign" that had managed to stay "positive."...Giuliani's way of staying "positive" was to use his ex–deputy mayor and periodic campaign spokesman, Randy Mastro, to invoke the Keating scandal, in which McCain—one of the so-called Keating Five—was blasted in a 1991 Senate ethics report that found he'd intervened with federal regulators on behalf of infamous S&L owner Charles Keating, who had given McCain major contributions, corporate jet rides, and annual family vacations in the Bahamas.

The dishonesty of the Giuliani farewell was a fitting conclusion to a campaign that had lied even about itself, inventing the fantasy of a waiting-for-Florida strategy after Rudy had spent $3 million and made 124 appearances in New Hampshire, where he wound up beating Ron Paul by only 2,000 votes. The premise of his campaign—which began in Giuliani's mind before the smoke had cleared at Ground Zero—was that the Iwo Jima–style visual of him covered in soot and walking through the canyons of Lower Manhattan that morning would transcend his personal and political shortcomings and carry him into the White House. By the time he got to the endgame in Florida, he was even willing to run an ad that was all 9/11, with video footage of the carnage and a resolute voice declaring that "when the world wavered and history hesitated, he never did." But the uproar caused him to pull it almost instantly, the last gasp of a failed strategy of exploitation. (An editorial cartoon soon appeared of Giuliani behind a podium with just the numbers "9-11" on it and a campaign operative explaining that those were his polling numbers in Florida.) Once the mythology had worn thin, Giuliani's baggage loomed large, and the speaker who'd once earned six-figure fees couldn't draw three-figure crowds in the Panhandle.

As false as the campaign's central rationale was, so too were its collateral claims. Giuliani boasted in his farewell that he'd resisted the pressure to do negative ads, but in fact his commercials were fraudulent attacks on the very city he'd governed, appealing to longstanding American prejudices while portraying himself as the man who'd tamed the beast that is New York. He also produced an ad that distorted his own bout with prostate cancer for political purposes, using spurious numbers to draw false comparisons between American and British cancer treatments in an ugly assault on Democratic health-care proposals. He went to the last day hyping his 23 tax cuts as mayor, even after his campaign acknowledged that Giuliani was counting cuts he had nothing to do with, including ones engineered by state legislators, the governor, and the City Council. He brayed on and on about how he'd slashed the city's welfare rolls by 600,000 people and would combat any form of "socialized medicine" as president—and then promised Florida homeowners who had built their mansions in a hurricane path a multibillion-dollar catastrophe fund. Giuliani took shots at his former positions on gun control; promised to appoint the kind of judges who would reverse the Roe v. Wade decision whose anniversary he once celebrated; divorced himself from the gay couple who sheltered him before, on, and after 9/11; and said that he would have deported, if possible, all the undocumented workers he used to embrace.

It Wasn't Giuliani's Fault, It Was the Political Press Killed the Beast

Already there's a revisionist spin on the collapse of Giuliani. It wasn't the stupid incompetent primary strategy. It wasn't the the lack of a coherent reason for his candidacy. It wasn't the fact that the more people came to know him the less they liked him. No. It was the New York political press that martyred Saint Rudy.

That's the take of some columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael Smerconish.

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.

Is this guy for real? Here, a typical piece of his evidence:

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

Maybe because he spent an uninterrupted 30 days and $40 million on a Florida contest he said was the clincher and was still in third or fourth place?

And this guy has a job as a reporter?