Considering it wasn’t that long ago that he was a frontrunner, I’ve never seen someone disappear so thoroughly, so quickly.
I thought it was a huge mistake for him to abandon Iowa and I’d love nothing more than to claim I was right, but was leaving Iowa to Romney (which Romney didn’t even win) the thing that killed his campaign or was it something else?
Or am I predicting the death of his candidacy too prematurely?
A lot of people seemed to have a stiffie for Thompson, too, but it turns out that if you want to be president you actually have to campaign.
Obama, Clinton, Romney, and McCain haven’t been running around constantly because they WANT to.
-Joe
I don’t think so.
Giuliani predicted his campaign on being able to win the New York retirees in Florida to build momentum on Super Tuesday. Unfortunately, by abandoning the six or so states that voted before Florida he allowed the others in the race to get all of the excited frontrunner buzz and he was left out in the cold.
Now that it looks like he won’t carry Florida he’s got nothing to stand on anywhere.
It turns out that you can only ride “9/11” so far before everyone goes into disaster-blindness and stops hearing the phrase altogether.
Given that Giuliani didn’t have a lot of money, I thought concentrating on the first big state was a wise decision. However, it is now apparent that his message wasn’t getting out to the rest of the nation because the media virtually ignored him. People are influenced by polls, and apparent momentum.
Its a shame, because Giuliani had a specific platform on eliminating the income tax. I don’t know how he would have replaced it, but I have to assume it would be a consumption tax. That is the first time I’ve ever heard a political leader propose the elimination of this regressive tax and something I’ve dreamed about for years.
Ran out of edit time.
Also, Florida has a lot of retirees, for whom a consumption tax instead of income tax would appear as an additional burden on them.
Cite? Huckabee has this, I’ve never seen Giuliani talk about it. And I don’t quite get how you can call an income tax regressive and a consumption tax progressive - it is exactly the other way around.
Rudy is a piece of slime. He’s got the worst judgment in people of anyone (not just Kerik) He’s vindictive, gets back at people who don’t agree, and is basically an asshole. His campaign collapsing gives me, as a former New Yorker, great pleasure. I don’t know why he thought Florida would be great for him - it didn’t work for Lindsay.
Real specific, eh?
It’s become accepted wisdom that Giuliani never competed in Iowa and New Hampshire, but it isn’t true. In particular, he spent all kinds of money in New Hampshire early on–it just wasn’t getting him anywhere.
All those early polls that showed Giuliani as the frontrunner coincided with polls that showed people didn’t know anything about him. He was just that guy who made all those nice speeches on 9/11. As people looked a little closer and saw the terminally corrupt pro-choice serial adulterer, the bloom came off his rose in a hurry.
But did people even get a chance to see that? It seems like he just disappeared.
He spent a lot of time and money in New Hampshire, apparently figuring he couldn’t win Iowa if he tried. His poll numbers kept slipping, so eventually he threw in the towel and spent all his energy on Florida. (Somehow he also managed to convince everyone that he’d never even tried in New Hampshire, which is false.) Now it looks like he’ll be lucky to finish third there. People who are seeing him up close don’t like him, at least compared to the other candidates.
I have to think it never got that far.
What seemed to happen was that, for whatever reasons, the more people saw of Rudy, the less they liked him: the more he’d campaign in a state, the more his poll numbers would tank. That’s what ultimately drove his ‘later state’ strategy: he’d campaigned in Iowa and NH in the summer and fall, and his numbers went down rather than up.
Why people didn’t like him when they saw him up close, I really don’t know. Maybe after the campaign is over, Rudy’s campaign pollster will spill some secrets. Surely they must’ve done some focus groups to see what was going on.
I think we can credit Joe Biden for initiating Rudy’s plummet.
“All he’s got is a noun a verb and 9-11.”
Almost immediately, light dawned all over the place.
His campaign’s FEC statements, if I’m reading them right (summing ‘receipts this period’ from his amended 2006 year-end and 2007 April, July, and October quarterly amended statements), show that Rudy raised over $47,000,000 through September 30 of last year. Which was very good money, at least by the standards of the GOP field.
I’m not a big Biden fan, but that may have been the best line of the campaign so far.
I still give a lot of credit for Rudy’s collapse to the issue of security for his then-girlfriend while mayor. Although he was cleared of wrongdoing, he never got those points in the polls back.
Your right. I only heard it once on the same program as both were featured and misremembered.
If you tax labour, you’ll repress the desire to work. i can’t tell how many times people have told me that overtime even at a premium rate isn’t worth it because of the taxes.
Here is my almost identical thread on the same topic.
Yup, in the '90s, when taxes were higher, no one did any work at all. People in much higher tax brackets than those who get OT never try to make more. Your anecdote tells me that those people are lazy, not that they have any economic savvy.
Well, I hope those people weren’t doing any work that required arithmetic. Earning more money is ALWAYS worth it.