Rudy Giuliani is not going to run for New York governor.  The word on the street is that he is taking a run at the Senate, and the further word on the street is that he is going to use the Seat as a springboard for a 2012 Presidential run.

Or, more exactly, he is going to use the Senate campaign and a Senate campaign victory as a springboard for a presidential run.  For the life of me I don’t know if a victory is necessary for the plan, or if he could just go from a losing senate campaign to a presidential bid.  The good news is that he would be running for the two year remainder of Kirsten Gilibrand’s appointed Senate seat, so there would be no purpose in running for re-election from that post (unless he were planning a 2016 bid.)  As Giuliani would be spending his Senate term running those Presidential hurdles — I suppose this time out making sure to try to win New Hampshire — he’d sort of have those two years of Senate experience in vacancy.

Say what you will about Obama, but when he won the Senate in Illinois in 2004, the voters were voting for a new Senator, not a presidential candidate, and he wandered into the Senate at least long enough to get a campaign booster or two — a Coburn Obama Transparency Act to wield on the campaign.  New Yorkers would best view a Giuliani Senate bid as elecing a passage-way for a Giuliani Presidential bid, akin to what Hillary Clinton’s 2006 re-election bid was, save she had a full term behind her and would have four years of a Senate seat ahead of her should she fail to be elected.

It is a strange prize, and a strange thing to ask the state electorate to vote for.  New Yorkers would be electing Giuliani into a “Temporal Vacuum”.  At the moment, Giuliani leads in the polls, but I suspect this will fade in the campaign season — Kirsten Gilibrand has relatively low name recognition in the polls, and Giuliani would be expecting a split election for Cuomo to the governorship (probably), Charles Schumer for another term as Senior Senator, and him as Temporal Vacuum.

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