When members of Rudy Giuliani’s traveling press corps boarded the campaign jet Monday afternoon, they were surprised to find small gifts waiting for them: Nestled in each of the charter’s plush leather seats was a baseball, scribbled with Giuliani’s signature. The reporters weren’t quite sure what to make of the mementos. Unlike other presidential candidates, who periodically gift their embedded reporters with campaign swag like t-shirts and baseball caps, Giuliani is notoriously stingy. The gesture was so uncharacteristic that everyone began to wonder: Was this a token of farewell? Turns out, it was.
Tuesday night, a senior campaign official confirmed that Giuliani will end his bid for the presidency and endorse Sen. John McCain. While Giuliani himself implied that he would be bowing out of the race, he did not say so directly. In remarks at Orlando’s Portofino Bay Hotel, Giuliani continuously used the past tense when referring to his campaign, and spoke in cryptic language, saying things like “win or lose, our work is not done,” and “the responsibility of leadership does not end with a single campaign.”
The crowd at the Portofino was small, barely filling a quarter of the hotel ballroom. While a handful of campaign volunteers broke out in tears of disappointment following the speech, the majority of his audience seemed resigned, and perhaps not even aware that they had witnessed a pull out speech at all. Still, Giuliani’s third place finish should not have come as a surprise: Florida polls had been placing him behind McCain and Mitt Romney for days. Amongst Giuliani’s embedded media, bets were made over when the candidate would drop out and preliminary obituaries were drafted.
For months, Giuliani’s campaign conducted itself as though the Florida primary could operate in a vacuum. Initially, it seemed as though their strategy would work. In the fall, Giuliani led his opponents by double digits in the Sunshine State. An October Quinnipiac poll pegged him at 30 percent, while McCain trailed in a distant second with only 14 percent. The question now is how does the campaign explain defeat in a state they called “Rudy Country”?
The easy answer is that Giuliani’s advisors and campaign strategists underestimated the power of early voting in states like Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan. As a result, Giuliani lost ground in the wake of his opponents’ respective primary bounces. But the attitude of the Giuliani campaign post-Iowa/New Hampshire was akin to that of a spurned lover trying to save face: Staffers shrugged their shoulders. The attitude was, ‘whatever, we never really cared about those states anyway.’
After he took a beating in Iowa, Giuliani assured a New Hampshire audience that he wasn’t concerned. “This is the strategy that we selected pretty close to day one,” he said. “No insult to Iowa at all, but we see this as a different kind of election, a different primary election.”
But while the campaign readily admits to snubbing Iowa, Giuliani did care about New Hampshire. He invested a significant chunk of change and time stumping in the Granite State. As NEWSWEEK reported earlier this month, Giuliani shelled out around $2.5 million for New Hampshire campaign ads and spent 41 days campaigning there. He put himself on the line, and the voters of New Hampshire shot him down.
As with the earlier states, Giuliani once again pinned defeat on circumstance and strategy. In an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America Tuesday, he told host Robin Roberts “we are going to win today. And then, of course, you know, if you don’t win, you figure out another strategy.”
But even as the votes started coming in, Giuliani’s staunchest supporters seemed to have lost confidence. Suzanne Citere of Lighthouse Point, Fla., switched parties in order to be able to vote for Giuliani in the Republican primary. “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” she said at Bonefish Mac’s Sports Grille. “But honestly, I don’t know what went wrong with Florida. I think [Giuliani] might have assumed that because of the large number of New York [transplants] here, he would be successful. But not everyone in Florida likes New Yorkers.”
Then there is the argument that the press, with whom Giuliani has a notoriously frosty relationship, did not give him a fair shake. Whereas the media have fawned over the outspoken John McCain, Giuliani has received little press coverage, mostly due to the fact that he hasn’t made much news.
Former congressman Bill McCollum, now Florida’s Attorney General and Giuliani’s Sunshine State campaign chairman, said Tuesday that the press and the pundits incited a “self-fulfilling prophecy” for Giuliani. “There’s a sense,” McCollum added, “that the press has come along and tried to make this a two-way race. But if the voters were left to decide for themselves, Rudy would win.”
It seems a somewhat circular logic: the press didn’t cover Giuliani because he didn’t do well in the polls, and Giuliani couldn’t do well in the polls without the press to increase his visibility. Either way, Giuliani’s staff remained closed to the media throughout the campaign. His press people played hot and cold with reporters, offering unsolicited interviews with the candidate to some, while denying access to others. Emailed questions often went unanswered, as did requests for regular media advisories and campaign schedules. These actions were returned in kind on Monday:
After the autographed baseballs were distributed, reporters immediately began checking and reporting their worth on EBay (anywhere from $16.99 to $500.00) and blogging about the motivations behind the gift. MSNBC’s First Read wrote that “it seemed like a going-away present from a campaign that has appeared more resigned to its fate in recent days. Campaign staffers and the press have been dancing around the future throughout the day, with one reporter even joking with a press aide about finding new jobs.”
The campaign was not amused. They felt it was a nice gesture and that there was a certain sense of “damned if you do and damned it you don’t,” a sentiment that translated over into Giuliani’s campaign in general: If Giuliani had continued to play it cool and spin Florida as it had Iowa and New Hampshire, he might have appeared overly detached, perhaps even delusional. Now he will officially bow out, and risk looking as though he wasn’t up to the challenges of campaigning. So how does Giuliani move forward? The answer is, he doesn’t, although he has pledged to “stay involved.’ Meanwhile, the reporters wait in the wings, pens poised, ready to write that obit.
