Swiftboating Rudy?

John Heilemann:

An air of aching familiarity hovered over the anti–Rudy Giuliani rally staged last week on Park Avenue by an array of aggrieved 9/11 families, firefighters, and rescue workers. This was, after all, the fourth time the group, led by Deputy Fire Chief Jim Riches, who lost a son in the conflagration, has leveled its passel of 9/11-related charges—the comprehensive lack of preparedness, the faulty radios, the placement of the emergency command center in the WTC complex even after the 1993 bombing—against the former mayor. But familiar or not, the protest afforded Riches the chance to announce his long-term objective: “We intend to Swift-boat Rudy the way they Swift-boated Kerry,” he told the Daily News.

A normal presidential candidate would regard such a threat as at least mildly unnerving. But Giuliani more likely takes it as a kind of compliment—a sign that he has crossed the threshold, that he’s now the man to beat in the Republican presidential race. (Who would waste any energy plotting to Swift-boat Sam Brownback?) Projecting an image of presumptive nomineehood, in fact, has lately been at the center of his strategy: his trip to London, full of foreign-policy pronunciamento and saber-rattling toward Iran; his feral attacks on MoveOn.org over the Petraeus-Betray-Us ad; his declaration that 2008 will boil down to “Who does America want for their [sic] future, Rudolph Giuliani or Hillary Clinton?”

In political circles, the reaction to the notion that Giuliani—with his record of out-front social liberalism, soap-operatic personal life, and dabbling in transvestism—might actually become the GOP standard-bearer has long been McEnroe-esque: You cannot be serious! Yet Giuliani has led in virtually every national poll since he declared his candidacy. The entry of Fred Thompson, who has come across more like Deputy Dawg than a plausible Rudy-slayer, has done little to change that. And although Giuliani trails Mitt Romney by double digits in Iowa, he’s within striking distance of first in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he tops the field in Florida and California. Translation: It could happen.

Even so, Giuliani remains a highly problematic candidate, just not in the ways that so many assume. The received wisdom has always held that Rudy would make a formidable general-election contender yet a prohibitively weak one in the Republican primaries. Eight months into the campaign, however, it strikes me that the reality might prove precisely the opposite—that Giuliani may be the candidate most in tune with the GOP primary electorate, but that the very qualities that have served his cause best so far would cripple his chances in the general.

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No, I can't imagine anyone Swiftboating Brownback either. But the original charges against Kerry came from honest deeply held anger at John Kerry for his insults against Vietnam veterans with his charges that we were the modern day equivalent of Genghis Kahn. From my own experience in Vietnam, I knew that Kerry's charges were false. Before I became the executive office of a Marine rifle company I worked in the 3rd Marine Division Communication Center where I read and routed every message that came in during a 12 hour period seven days a week. There was not one message at any level of clearance going all the way to Top Secret which supported his charges that brutalities were occurring and that all levels of command knew it. None. For some reason, Democrats were offended by people like me sticking up for the truth about our war effort in Vietnam. Clearly John Kerry was no hero to most of us.

The attacks on Rudy are something else entirely. They are not by people he insulted while working hard to help New York City through a terrible crisis. His efforts were in the open for all to see so they cannot be called self aggrandizements as Kerry's questionable medals were. If you examine the gripes they amount to hind sight bias over decisions made by many including the mayor in the years leading up to the event. They are al matters over which people could have reasonable disagreements given the information available at the time.

Besides, I thought Democrats were against Swiftboating. I guess that is a position they have just for their candidates, sort of like being against the politics of personal destruction. It is for Democrats only.