This is going down pretty much the same path as theHuckabee thread, so I’ll be brief.
Giuliani is pro-choice, which makes him unacceptable to a large portion of Republicans. Period. Full stop. Don’t even bother to argue it.
Giuliani’s 2008 campaign proved that he doesn’t bring a whole lot of game.
Every Congressional district in New York City except one (Staten Island) has aDemocratic representative in Congress. Only two NYC districts in the state assembly (again, Staten Island) are represented by Republicans. Out of the 50 members of the New York City Council,48 are Democrats.(Even one of Staten Island’s council members is a Democrat!)
The “urban Northeastern governor who’s tough on crime” slot is already occupied by Chris Christie on the Republican side and Martin O’Malley on the Democratic. Look how well they’re doing.
Giuliani would be like former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, both Northeasterners, but they are pro-choice Republicans. Ridge would be good for a Marco Rubio, he adds experience to a young Rubio who would be 45 on Election Day if nominated by the GOP. We’ll see if Ridge and Giuliani would be considered for vice president in 2016, with the way how national security is going now, they may be on top of the vice presidential shortlists.
Giulliani would be a great choice for VP and a great way to send a message to general election voters that the party is still a big tent. Very useful if Clinton goes hard left for her VP nominee, although I think that’s unlikely.
As for Giuliani’s appeal in parts of New York, okay, that’s nice if you’re going for a higher popular vote total to make your mandate look bigger. Doesn’t do much in a close race. You pick Rudy for national reasons.
I’m not sure why from the Democratic perspective, Giuliani is anymore preferable to Trump except for a thin varnish of supposed bourgeois respectability.
But from the perspective of the Republican voter, there’s literally nothing Giuliani offers that Trump doesn’t have while Trump has the added attractions of being an immensely successful billionaire, incredible celebrity/publicity, and some “out of the box” thinking on trade, foreign policy, and a few other issues. I’m not sure why if these Republican voters aren’t going for Chris Christie (who basically is Giuliani’s surrogate without some of the added baggage of having previously taken culturally liberal stances), they’d be attracted to someone whose been out of any political office for over a decade and whose last presidential campaign in 2008 went from him being in the lead to self destructing quite spectecularly winning nor even doing well in any state.
It’s pretty clear that Giuliani meant to say “after 9/11.” Which is still wrong, but you’d have to be pretty uncharitable to read him there as claiming that the 9/11 attacks never happened. He misspoke.
Of course, Al Gore misspoke when he accidentally said he created the Internet, and people still today seem to think he meant to make such a ridiculous claim, so I guess the Giuliani quote would have legs as far as ammunition for his opponent goes.
Maybe he meant to say that, but even if he meant that, and even if it were true, it’s still ludicrous. You can’t with any seriousness say that “Bush kept us safe”, when the largest attack in American history happened under his watch. It makes no sense to say “other than that, he kept us safe”. This is beyond even “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”.