JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHAT RUDY BELIEVES. As a free preview from our upcoming May print issue, Michael Tomasky's cover story on Rudy Giuliani is availabe to non-subscribers. Mike, who covered Giuliani throughout his years as New York's mayor and during his abortive Senate run, shares his thoughts on a man whose preferred -ism appears to be sadism.
Conservatives who admire Rudolph Giuliani for his association with the date September 11, 2001, may wish to consult Google on the question of the mayor's behavior on May 10, 2000. The Rudy of that date should give them, and everyone, reason to stop and think about the great hero's moral architecture.
The weeks leading up to the date had been surreal. Giuliani was running for a U.S. Senate seat against Hillary Clinton. The traditional Senate campaign in New York consists of swings upstate to discuss economic development and airfares, day trips out to Long Island to curse sprawl and pledge devotion to oysters, and occasional high-minded speeches in the city at places like the Council on Foreign Relations -- Clinton's tedious, but quite effective, course. Rudy's, however: Rudy's campaign since March had consisted of vicious attacks on a police-shooting victim named Patrick Dorismond; an announcement by his estranged wife, Donna Hanover, that she would appear in The Vagina Monologues ("GYNO-MITE!" ran the headline in the New York Post); and the exposure, at long last, of Rudy's extramarital relationship, with a woman named Judith Nathan. In the middle of it all, he'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer, but even that sympathetic note seemed strange enough as to be somehow part of his willed unraveling.
A full week had now passed since the Nathan story broke, and Giuliani, in the face of a frenzied media circus, had said nothing publicly about his marriage. A photo, indelibly etched in my memory, from Cardinal John O'Connor's May 8 funeral service -- he had died the same night Nathan hit the papers -- summed up the weirdness better than any words could: There in the front pews sat the Clintons, the Gores, the Bushes, the Patakis, and, all by himself, Giuliani. And so the papers, that morning of May 10, carried livid admonitions from Republicans like state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno for the mayor to return to planet Earth, to address his situation, and to run a campaign. As fate would have it, I had lunch that day on Union Square with Juleanna Glover Weiss, Giuliani's just-hired press secretary who later went on to a certain kind of fame as one of "Cheney's Angels" (the vice president's loyal and secretive spokeswomen). So I missed the press conference -- as did she, more importantly -- at the New York Public Library at which The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller asked Giuliani, "Do you have any reaction to Mr. Bruno's comments yesterday � about your marriage?"
Read on for Rudy's answer, and why it matters.
--The Editors
