A confident and gregarious Rudy Giuliani yesterday on Meet the Press. He’s near-bulletproof in the chair, a testament to his many years spent learning to survive New York’s Darwinian media pit. Still, it was mostly an hour of tough sledding. Rudy didn’t get much chance to sell his wares. Instead he was bobbing and weaving like a trapped middleweight as Tim Russert piled on the questions. Rudy pushed back hard and fought Russert off several times; his survival technique was to dance and filibuster. It worked in the beginning, but the questions kept coming and coming. Rudy’s murky business stuff, the Judith Nathan body-guarding kerfuffle, paid speeches instead of Iraq Study Group duty, Bernie Kerik … the works. You got the sense Russert still had another hour’s worth of nasty material in his binder. My guess is a lot of Republicans watching it started to wonder if this endless ethical grilling was what a general election with Rudy would look like: “Hmm … If the Democrats nominate Obama, he’ll grind Rudy on ethics and deals. If they nominate Hillary, her wheeling and dealing and ethical blind spots suddenly look a lot harder to attack. Why are we all saying Rudy is the best general election candidate again?” Accepting a moderate / social-liberal Republican from New York City is already an unnatural act for GOP primary voters to commit, and while Rudy has so far done an amazing job of keeping his campaign aloft with a mighty display of rapid, hummingbird-like wing flapping, the latest polls indicate that gravity may now be re-asserting itself. One wonders if all of this Gotham-esque ethical squabbling will combine to become a Brooklyn Bridge too far for the solid burghers of the GOP. With Hillary floundering as well, there just might be a pox this year on both New York houses.
