MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Who’s in Rudy’s Mirror?” Ellis Henican column, am/New York, p. 4,July 31, 2009
Pretty soon, Rudy Giuliani will have to look in mirror and decide who’s looking back.
Is it a used-to-be mayor of New York with a lucrative consulting business?
Or is it a pumped-up Republican leader for today, beginning another run for public office?
It’s Rudy’s choice to make, but he can’t delay much longer — or his moment of political potency will have passed for good. “The Mayor of September 11th” is a fine political slogan. But it is not an eternal one.
The ex-mayor spoke in Manhattan on Thursday to an audience of business executives. He delivers these speeches from time to time so people won’t forget who he is.
He threw a few jabs at Barack Obama — “gone further to the left than I thought he would” and “the most left-wing agenda …since Roosevelt.” But that isn’t what people came to hear. They wanted to know will Rudy run for governor next year?
“I haven’t thought about it nearly as much as I get asked about it,” he said coyly. “If I get asked about it even more, I’ll think about it even more.”
Translation: Keep asking, please.
Giuliani’s last two stabs at public office have not gone well. He quit his 2000 U.S. Senate race against Hillary Clinton as his second marriage collapsed and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He abandoned his much anticipated run for president last year after ducking Iowa and New Hampshire getting clobbered in the Florida Republican primary.
So is up for one last rumble?
David Paterson’s unpopular. Andrew Cuomo hasn’t declared anything. If not now, when? The obvious answer is never.
So which face has Rudy been seeing when he shaves? The way he rambled at the business speech, he didn’t seem to know.
“I think you decide to run for office, or not, when it’s something in your… it’s intuitive,” he said. “When you just know the time is right and the place is right, and if I thought I could make a real difference in this state, really change things, and people really needed me, then I’d do it.”
Email ellis@henican.com. Follow at twitter.com/henican
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