Rudy’s Mislaid Battle Plans
The New York Daily News reports on an unintended document leak from the Giuliani campaign:
It’s clearly laid out in 140 pages of printed text, handwriting and spreadsheets: The top-secret plan for Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the White House.
The remarkably detailed dossier sets out the budgets, schedules and fund-raising plans that will underpin the former New York mayor’s presidential campaign – as well as his aides’ worries that personal and political baggage could scuttle his run.
At the center of his efforts: a massive fund-raising push to bring in at least $100 million this year, with a scramble for at least $25 million in the next three months alone.
The loss of the battle plan is a remarkable breach in the high-stakes game of presidential politics and a potentially disastrous blunder for Giuliani in the early stages of his campaign.
The document was obtained by the Daily News from a source sympathetic to one of Giuliani’s rivals for the White House. The source said it was left behind in one of the cities Giuliani visited as he campaigned for dozens of Republican candidates in the weeks leading up to the November 2006 elections.
…Giuliani leads most public opinion polls of Republican primary voters though he has not announced his candidacy for President. But the dossier, which envisions spending more than $21 million this year alone, shows that Giuliani began meeting with potential supporters last April and that by October, his staff had put in place a detailed plan for a serious bid for the presidency. But they also depict a candidate torn between his prosperous business and a political future full of both promise and risk.
One page cites the explicit concern that he might “drop out of [the] race” as a consequence of his potentially “insurmountable” personal and political vulnerabilities.
On the same page is a list of the candidate’s central problems in bullet-point form: his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; “social issues,” on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover.
The story is of more interest for its confirmation that Rudy is almost certain to run than for its ‘revelations’ of Rudy’s issues. As Tom Bevans says:
The document is a bit of an embarrassment for Giuliani, but Smith overhypes it by characterizing it as a “potentially disastrous blunder.” After all, the four issues cited in the memo as potential problem points for Rudy’s candidacy (his private business, his relationship with Bernie Kerik, his third-wife, and his liberal positions on “social issues”) are hardly surprising. Whether those issues end up scuttling his bid is anyone’s guess, but it’s not like the document revealed some crippling secret.
Which of the candidates that will oppose Rudy don’t already know about these issues? Which of those wouldn’t try to use these issues to their own campaign’s advantage? Assuming he will have to answer for these issues, wouldn’t Rudy like to have them come up early in the campaign rather than late?
I smell a crafty move by Mr. Giuliani!
I think “too many steves” has hit the nail on the head. My first impression was that this was all planned.