The other day, Newsday broke what should be a highly damaging story about former New York mayor and current presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. It turns out that Giuliani was originally one of the members of the congressionally chartered Iraq Study Group (aka the Baker-Hamilton commission) that brought forward its findings late last year.
This wasn't a secret. There were press reports about it at the time, and at least a few press mentions when Giuliani left the commission and was replaced by Reagan-era worthy Ed Meese.
What wasn't known was just how it all went down. According to the Newsday story, two months into the commission's work, Giuliani had failed to show up to a single meeting. That got him a talking-to from lead Republican commission member James Baker. Either do the work, Baker told him, or you're off the commission. But Giuliani apparently had booked too many high-priced speaking engagements and he just didn't have the time. So he resigned from the commission in May, 2006.
That's a little kernel of information that could be very damaging to Giuliani's campaign, especially when you consider that he's made national security his signature, even his sole issue. (Think about it: for most of the GOP base, outside of fighting the jihadists, Rudy's just another pro-choice New Yorker with a bad attitude.) Iraq is the central issue of American politics today. Rudy signed on to serve on a congressionally chartered commission to help solve the quandary the country finds itself in Iraq. But he bagged so he could make more money giving speeches about 9/11 and leadership.
Giuliani claimed that he left the commission not to make time for buckraking speeches but because he was going to become a presidential candidate, and he didn't want his work on the commission to become a partisan football. But that answer doesn't really add up, since he was as much a candidate in March, 2006, when he signed on, as he was in May, 2006, when he resigned.
And, needless to say, it doesn't explain why he failed to show up for the meetings that were held while he was still on board.
A short time ago Giuliani released his "12 Commitments," promises of what he'd do as president. On this list, Iraq doesn't come up once. The omission seemed so jarring that a reporter for the New York Times asked him why. This was Giuliani's response: "What I was trying to do was to look at the things, as best you can predict it now, that are going to be there a year and a half from now. Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. 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. But what we do know for sure is the terrorists are going to be at war with us a year, a year and a half from now."
"We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be." I mean, don't go out on a limb or anything, right? And it's in other people's hands? That's an awfully blasé response for a leading presidential candidate.
And if you look closely at Giuliani's statements about Iraq on the campaign trail as well as on the chat shows and the debates, it's actually quite representative: minimize it as an issue and move back to terrorism in general.
Given how badly Iraq has damaged John McCain over the last six months and how leery GOP base voters have been of candidates who break strongly with the president on the issue, it's really no surprise that Giuliani doesn't want to talk about the subject at all.
My question is why reporters and even the other candidates are letting him.
