With Rudy Giuliani’s campaign effectively over, it’s worth spending a moment on his unusual demise. The conventional wisdom is that Giuliani’s strategy of focusing on Florida was foolish. The truth, as it always seems to be, is a bit more complicated. Giuliani attempted to target New Hampshire, spending more than $2 million in ads there, and played quietly (mostly direct mail) in Iowa. Still, the basic point holds: Giuliani thought he could win by attempting to shape the primary calendar and focusing most of his attention on Florida. It didn’t work. In that sense, Giuliani and Fred Thompson failed for similar reasons. Each man thought of himself as a larger-than-life presidential candidate and believed he could run a new kind of presidential race. So Thompson announced after Labor Day and resisted the advice of some advisers (on his campaign team and in the media) to get in as soon as he possibly could. Thompson toyed with the idea of getting in before the Ames, Iowa, straw poll on August 11. But he waited. And the longer he waited, the more his chances faded away. As one Thompson adviser told me: “It wasn’t so much that he was lazy, as everybody says, but it was hubris.” Giuliani, for his part, never really seemed to engage on the campaign trail. We’ve seen Giuliani’s effectiveness when he focused on the task at hand. He didn’t do that here. His early speeches were little more than rambling versions of the paid speeches he’d been giving for years. “He was the Washington Speakers Bureau candidate,” said one observer not affiliated with a campaign. He seemed to believe that because he was “America’s Mayor” he would become America’s president. When will Giuliani endorse? Soon, I’d guess.
