Free For All - The Free Liberal Blog: Ba-Bye, Rudy and Fred

September 2008

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There you stood on the edge of your feather, Expecting to fly.
-Neil Young

The recent drop outs on the R side of the ledger got me thinking about Neil Young's song, "Expecting to Fly." As one who admires the seeming sloth of Calvin Coolidge over the micromanaging ways of Jimmy Carter, it pains me to say: Even if you are lazy, it pays to look like you're not. Think of the George Costanza character on Seinfeld, feigning overwork and stress whenever a colleague or superior was in earshot. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Rudy Giuliani – once angling to be the nation's first Italo-American president (HT to fellow pizanne Nick Gillespie) – has puzzled me for over a year. How could he possibly appeal to the social conservatives? He seemed to pull it off, for a while, making them forget their prudish tendencies for an even bigger fear: 9/11, or more properly, a repeat of 9/11. Still, I was shocked that he held the #1 spot in national polls for as long as he did.

But then came the actual primaries and caucuses. Rudy was a no-show. Did he not learn of the import of the Big Mo from Bush the Elder? To be a leader, you've got to look like one, act like one, win the early skirmishes, or at least artfully play the expectations game. Giuliani did none of this that I can detect.

Fred Thompson seemed relatively benign to me personally, compared with the rest of the "top tier" candidates. He all but yawned in the debates. It's one thing to strike a stately, dignified, above-the-fray pose when running for prez, another to seem numb and uninterested. It even started to appear that his young, comely wife had pushed him into running.

Seems like we Americans don't want hen-pecked, lazy dudes in the Oval Office (although I can think of far more inappropriate qualities). But the lesson learned is: If you want to fly Air Force One, you've got to at least flap your wings.

-RC

Comments

Excellent points.

I thought Giuliani dealt pretty well with making his pro-choice past palatable to the social conservative mind. (Much more convincing than Romney, IMO.) He played the "Federalism" and "Personal Opinion vs. Legislatable Issue" cards nicely.

Thompson was too philosophical to get anybody but philosophers excited. And there ain't many o' them out there. Plato said philosophers will always look like useless cranks, so people have a hard time seeing them as leaders.

Posted by: Micah Tillman | January 31, 2008 03:50 PM

Yes, Micah, on abortion Rudy did SEEM to call a truce. Or he changed the subject, and the social cons temporarily looked away, signing onto to Team Rudy, who was looking inevitable at the time.

That truce fell apart faster than a NY minute, possibly because of the Huckabee surge. Social cons were squeamish about Romney and his last-minute conversion, no one at that point seemed to trust McCain, Thompson was asleep. Paul, Hunter, and Tancredo had not poked into the first tier, and even the Catholics don't pray to St. Jude (patron saint of lost causes) in elections.

Posted by: Robert Capozzi | February 1, 2008 04:49 PM

Ba-Bye, Rudy and Fred

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