Josh Marshall is enjoying himself immensely, redlining whatever gauge measures Schadenfreude at the expense of Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. No "fair use" quote can do it justice.
If I were Rudy's consigliere, I would do everything possible to get Democratic blood on the ice - now. The more bitterness, the more chaos later. I don't particularly like any of the Democratic candidates, though if you made me pick a Democratic ticket it would probably be Richardson/Obama. I did like Gravel's speech the other day about same-sex marriage but Gravel is in the upper-tier of the Kucinich "A" minor league of candidates. Richardson, a competent "AAA" team with a major league resume of foreign policy experience, will not win the Democratic nomination in the absence of multiple hard-core scandal or acts of self-destruction by the other candidates. What Rudy needs is for the Democratic nominee to lack legitimacy and solid support among Democrats; that gives him an opening in swing states.
Giuliani is probably the candidate most able to distance himself both culturally and on the Iraq war from President Bush, whose popularity approaches that of explosive diarrhea by the minute. Giuliani also has a secret weapon in the South that neither Romney nor especially McCain have: a proven, documented record of inflicting government-sanctioned police street violence against Black Americans, replete with brutality suits. Romney never turned the police in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts into a battering ram against Black residents, and McCain simply hasn't stepped up to show his animosity towards Black Americans from his Senate seat. I would expect that the same people in South Carolina who put out anti-McCain literature accusing him of miscegenation and an illegitimate child in 2002 may be there for Giuliani, or their modern surrogates. Giuliani needs to get his record of street violence known in order to prevail in the primary; he needs anti-black racism because he just isn't going to sell anybody on tax cuts (a New Yorker?!), same-sex marriage (he lived with a gay couple while trying to sort out Wife #2 from New Young Squeeze #3) or abortion (see "tax cuts" above.)
The conversation would go something like this:
Bob Leigh: Too bad we don't have a Sothron running this yeah.
Geoff Davies: Well, we do, suh; Governor Huckabee is running.
Leigh: Well Ah'm happy that that poor redneck lost that weight but money in the bank is like gasoline in the tank and he just doesn't have any. He might make a nice Secretary of Agriculture to the next President; now who will that be?
Davies: Well, McCain is running hard.
Leigh: We may as well not bother; they called Reagan old for a reason and he's half a liberal flake. How rude he was to our Christian universities and leaders, just like a Yankee.
Davies: Well, I believe McCain is from Arizona. But have you look at Romney, suh?
Leigh: Oh yes, a Massachusetts liberal Yankee Jew.
Davies: He's a Mormon, suh.
Leigh: A Mormon? Well, he can have one wife serving tea and one under the desk like Ms. Lewinsky?
[Unenlightened laughter ensues]
Davies: Well, suh, there is the New Yorker, Giuliani?
Leigh: Giuliani? Now who ordered us a New York liberal Yankee Jew?
[Narrow-minded guffaws reverberate]
Davies: Please Mr. Leigh, I just ate!
Leigh: Ha-ha! [Grab's Dewars bottle, pours two shots] Well, I don't see myself voting for a New York Jew, Davies.
Davies: Well, I hear that he is Eye-Talian and Catholic.
Leigh: You are saying that, Davies, to make me feel better?
Davies: Well, that is to say -
Leigh: Never mind. I can't see voting for Jew-liani.
Davies: Well, suh, if I may, we know the unhappy uppity women won't like him, him and his three wives, or something like that, messy divorces, living with two women, I don't get it. They are getting all "feminist" up they-uh against him. Plus the coloreds hate him, complain that his police use "unfair force" and "police brutality." Al Sharpton, you know, the big nigra with the big mouth - he hates Giuliani for standing up to crime in that horrible city.
Leigh: Well, perhaps I misjudged this man. Even if he is a Yankee. Say, how can he be a Mormon and a Jew at th' same time?
Giuliani probably cannot win South Carolina but he can outperform expectations by a large margin and his best card is the race card. Particularly if Hillary stumbles badly and loses momentum; Giuliani's antifeminist credentials are a lot weaker than his credentials for inflicting violence on Black New Yorkers and he will need that credential to fight . Doubly true if Bush gets more politically toxic over the next nine months and opposing him stops looking like smart posturing and more like survival.
UPDATE: people can support the general concept of a tough-on-victimless/petty crimes approach, I think, in good faith, though how they can support what actually happened in practice evades me. I wasn't thrilled when O'Malley enforced zero tolerance in Baltimore but reasonable minds can differ. People can certainly criticize Al Sharpton in good faith; much exists to criticize, as Sharpton has admitted in his more self-reflective moments. Sharpton won't go down in South Carolina for being an serial antisemite or an adjudicated slanderer; he will go down for being a loud African-American minister. I think that South Carolina primary voters won't dig very deep; they won't talk about the cops who got disciplined, fired or prosecuted under Giuliani, or his (hardly unique) failure of foresight on the issue of interoperability of communications systems for crisis responders. I may be wrong, have been wrong before.
