Giuliani’s week, or weak as the case may be
By any measure, Rudy Giuliani had a horrible week. It is bad enough that some oxygen was sucked out by the edging toward presidential campaign of his successor, Michael Bloomberg. (I think there’s a limit to New Yorkers that the nation is going to be able to tolerate.) Also bad is that his South Carolina adviser was indicted on cocaine charges.
Probably most importantly in the matter of policy decisions, Rudy Giuliani just pulled the “You Can’t Fire me. I quit.” card on the Iraq Study Group, after the Iraq Study Group noted that he had opted out of their study sessions in favor of speaking engagements at those wacky “Get Motivated” Motivational Speaking tours.
Cue Fred Kaplan:
It was not as if Giuliani feared the group might take positions that conflicted with his own. For, as Josh Marshall and his researchers at Talking Points Memo discovered (to their surprise), Giuliani has no position on Iraq. He has long supported Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But on the question of what to do now, he’s been mum. Last week, Giuliani issued “the 12 Commitments,” a document that lays out the agenda of his presidency. The First Commitment concerns terrorism (“I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us”), but Iraq isn’t mentioned at all.
Asked about the omission, Giuliani said that the idea was to address issues that will still be with us in January 2009. “Iraq may get better, Iraq may get worse,” he said. “We may be successful in Iraq, we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people.”
First, what a bizarrely evasive comment, even by politicians’ standards. Second, does Giuliani have the slightest doubt that, whatever happens in the next 19 months, Iraq will remain one of the most urgent topics that a new president will have to confront? […]
His shrugged blow-off of Baker-Hamilton offers a glimpse at the darker side of America’s Mayor: that he’s in it not for the country, but for himself.
To be fair, they all are in it “for him(her)self”, and it’s a little too easy to see the sleights of hands the politicos are pulling on us, papering over their lack of policy acumen. But something here, by a man who so easily pounces on the “absurdity” of a policy approach to the middle East that is not composed of a simple “Stay on the Offense”, who could have picked up some pointers from the Iraq Study Group for something that doesn’t redound back to Bush the Next. I suspect a President Rudy Giuliani would do Dick Cheney one better. Cheney, when convenient, declares that the vice president is not part of the Executive Branch, thus not subject to particular aspects of oversight. When convenient, ie: for uses of power, it is. Giuliani, I imagine, will just do the same with the Presidency: no longer part of the Executive Branch. We’ll have to figure out a new name for it.
But I guess that this is roughly what the Republican’s rank and file dedicated want. The ones who figure in Bush’s 26 percent approval rating, similar to Nixon’s 23 percent — and easily transferable as the same group of individuals. They are the abuses of Power lovers.