Against Giuliani

"Hillary and Obama are kind of debating whether to invite [Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to the inauguration or the inaugural ball," says Rudy Giuliani. Andrew's right. This guy is out of his goddamn mind.

You know, a few years ago, Sally Quinn wrote an article explaining why elite Washington had united against Bill Clinton. In it, David Broder famously said that, "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place." He got a lot of flack for that comment. But it gets at an important truth: That the media does, indeed, come together to repel perceived threats. In Clinton's case, it was a gauche striver. He was a threat to DC's prestige, or vision of itself. Not the greatest danger in the world, but the media was quite effective in kneecapping him.

So what of Rudy? Rudy, after all, is a danger to the world. Every reporter in this town knows that he's become a pandering lunatic. Why doesn't Time have cover stories asking "Is hGiulianie out of his #($*^ mind!?" Why aren't the Sunday shows filled with horrified reporters agreeing to disagree about much of the race, but uniting against the apocalyptic stupidity on evidence in the Giuliani campaign? Why aren't the various horserace reporters fitting every successive foreign policy pronouncement into an overarching narrative of Giuliani's crazed belligerence, "which is causing serious doubts about his campaign among some in the GOP?"

There is precedent for all this. And in Giuliani's case, the threat has the added benefit of being true. You don't need to make anything up, invent any scandals, concoct any problems. You just have to honestly evaluate the words coming out of Giuliani's mouth, the rhetoric coming out of his campaign, and the advisers circling the candidate. It's all there. There's no blowjob, I know, but there's a real threat, and the media should, in its role as guardian of some minimal level of competency within the political process, be pointing out that this man is dangerous, his statements scary, his campaign unsettling, and his advisers insane. His is not a normal candidacy, and so long as the reporters continue treating it as the equivalent of Hillary Clinton's campaign rather than Pat Buchanan's, we're in trouble.