Karl Rove, thinking ahead about the Bush legacy, schooled some Republicans last week about what really happened to them last November. The GOP debacle at the polls, he said, was not the result of President Bush's overall poor job performance ratings or the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. Instead, he said, it was the widespread taint of corruption that doomed so many Republican candidates.
This week, in the midst of a growing rumble that the attorney general should resign or be impeached, we wake up to front-page newspaper pictures of a modest two-story house in Alaska. The house belongs to Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in history. Uncle Ted, as he is called in the 49th state, is under investigation for bribery and conspiracy related to a renovation project on his resort home outside Anchorage.
Stevens is a crusty, sometimes petulant, lawmaker with enormous power, and it hard to imagine that after almost 40 in years in the Senate, he is going to go down for putting his house up on stilts in some northern lights version of "Extreme Home Makeover."
The Stevens probe, along with investigations into a long list of other (mostly GOP) lawmakers, can only serve to reinforce the culture-of-corruption story line that worked so surprisingly well for the Democrats last fall. This, of course, is the last thing Republicans need going into 2008, where the political environment is promising to be especially unkind to them.
What does this portend for the field of GOP presidential candidates now flailing about to get some traction with the disheartened, scandal-weary, GOP base?
I think it means that at the end of the day, the man leading the pack today will not be the GOP nominee for president. Rudy Giuliani, the pugnacious former New York mayor, more than anyone else in the field, will force Republicans voters, buffeted by the constant stream of scandal -- from Abramoff to Foley to Vitter -- to think twice about exactly what kind of candidate they want to nominate next year.
His two terms as mayor of New York will provide opposition researchers one of the most fertile repositories of damaging information on a candidate since Gary Hart's 1984 invitation to: "Follow me around..."
The list of questions Giuliani will eventually have to answer could be long, involving everything from his troubled marriages and divorces to his close relationship with Bernie Kerik, who has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor public corruption charges for links to the mob. Giuliani is going to have to explain the bitter estrangement from his kids. There is an overarching sense that the real Giuliani story is like an unexploded device shadowing his campaign.
Michael Tomasky laid out Giuliani's problems in compelling fashion in The Prospect last April, where he warned conservatives that the post-9/11 Giuliani may not be worth the pre-9/11 dysfunction that will come with the package.
In addition, if you buy the idea that presidential politics often comes down to likeability, Giuliani's high-flying front-runner status is one of the enduring mysteries of this political season. Notoriously confrontational, Giuliani, during his two terms as mayor, managed to spur a conversation about niceness among, of all people, New Yorkers, which is a little like getting termites to question whether they are eating too much wood.
After Giuliani drove Schools Chancellor Ray Cortines -- the first of two he would drive into exile -- out of town in 1995, one of his predecessors, Ed Koch (who was still a Rudy supporter at the time) told me, "Rudy Giuliani is first-rate, but when it comes to his interpersonal relations, it is like dealing with Dr. Frankenstein's monster."
My guess is that sooner or later, the in-your-face, impolitic, set-your-teeth-on-edge Rudy is going to show up in this campaign and sent GOP voters running for the exits. Among the Republican candidates, Giuliani is the most natural heir to the Bush legacy of post-9/11 anti-terror toughness. He's running on the war, and that's why he's ahead. Giuliani will have to prove to GOP voters that he is enough like them in order for them to forgive some of the great ideological differences that separate them.
But the bigger challenge for Rudy will be to put to rest early the questions of his personal and professional integrity that may make them wary of getting in bed with him. Because, as Karl Rove said, it wasn't the war, it was the corruption. Uncle Ted is asking his constituents not to jump to conclusions. For GOP voters, the writing may be on the (remodeled) wall.
