Giuliani Campaign On the Ropes

Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign is on the ropes, according to the latest reports.

Here's this morning's Los Angeles Times story:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, once the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, said Friday that some of his staffers had started forgoing their salaries to ease the strain on the campaign's budget.

Giuliani told reporters at an appearance in Florida that the aides volunteered to defer their pay "to stretch the dollars even further." The former New York mayor has $7 million in hand to spend in upcoming primaries -- enough, his campaign said, to compete through the crucial Super Tuesday contests in more than 20 states, including California, Feb. 5.

Still, many political observers said the news signaled a surprising cash squeeze in a campaign that was thought to be managing its finances well. It also underscored Giuliani's sharp decline in recent weeks from front-runner to struggling contender, they said, while renewing questions about the wisdom of his decision to essentially take a pass on the earliest contests. The candidate has staked his prospects on winning in Florida on Jan. 29.

"He's in a tough spot," said John J. Pitney Jr., a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican National Committee staffer. "Up to now, Giuliani's fundraising appeared to be a major advantage, but . . . he's probably burned through a lot of money."

Campaign officials said that the budget situation dovetailed with their strategy of betting heavily on Florida and of using momentum from a primary victory here to galvanize fresh fundraising and support.

Giuliani, speaking to reporters after a stop at a school in the southern Florida community of Coral Gables, playfully said his campaign was using "a strategy of lulling your opponents into a false sense of security."

"Everyone has their own strategy," he said. "We think this is the best strategy, given our assets."

I've noted with increasing frequency of late how disastrous Giuliani's Florida launch pad strategy is looking. It's hard to beat the phenomenon of momentum, especially in with such a tightly frontloaded calendar, and not to mention the hunger in the electorate for change, leadership, or whatever's out there.

Sunday's Times of London fairly well places Giuliani's campaign on the precipice of disaster:

STRUGGLING to regain his former eminence in Republican presidential polls, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, last week announced the formation of a “catastrophe advisory committee” to help him form policies on handling national disasters. Some of his rivals promptly quipped that he should start by investigating his own campaign.

“Either Rudy is a genius, and is about to defy half a century of conventional political wisdom,” noted one leading New York Democrat last week. “Or he has run the most stupid presidential campaign in history.”

As Giuliani set off on a three-day bus trip around Florida yesterday, his once-commanding lead in Republican opinion polls had evaporated, he was trying to save money by not paying aides and his campaign strategy of focusing mainly on big industrial states was threatening to reduce him to also-ran status.

It has been a terrible new year for the former mayor, whose leadership credentials - built on his internationally acclaimed performance in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001 - established him as the frontrunner last year.

As recently as early last month, Giuliani was almost 15 points clear of the field in national polls; he was 33 points ahead in his native New York and 15 points up in Florida, which holds its primary on January 29. But a series of embarrassing political setbacks has knocked his legs from under him.

In one national poll last week, he plunged to third place among Republican candidates, with only 16% of the vote. In New York on Friday a Survey USA poll showed that his lead over John McCain, the surging Ari-zona senator who won the New Hampshire primary, had sunk to just three points.

Even Florida, long targeted by Giuliani as his ideal state to launch a winning campaign, is turning into a minefield. In a poll last Friday, he slipped into second place, eight points behind McCain.

Giuliani joked last week that he was lulling his rivals into “a false sense of confidence” and that victory in Florida would catapult him to the front of the race, a week before Super Tuesday on February 5, when 22 states will vote and the Republican nomination may be decided.

Yet his decision to ignore Iowa and to campaign only desultorily in New Hampshire has left him dangerously marginalised and running out of cash as McCain and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won in Iowa, have grabbed the political momentum and media limelight regarded as crucial to a successful White House campaign.

“Giuliani is done,” claimed Andy Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire’s poll survey centre. “He has run possibly the worst campaign of a leading candidate that I can remember. They made an incredibly bad strategic decision.”

It's not just strategic missteps hurting Giuliani's presidential aspirations:

Yet it is not just poorly conceived campaign strategy that is to blame for Giuliani’s woes. The emergence last year of embarrassing revelations about the costs of providing security for his mistress when he was mayor was followed by a run of negative publicity about his family, his business connections and his health.

At one point he entered hospital after a crippling headache forced him to turn around his campaign jet in mid-air, although tests revealed nothing serious. As the national media began to focus on Iowa and New Hampshire, Giuliani found himself starved of attention.

Suddenly America no longer seems interested in Giuliani’s 9/11 exploits, the cornerstone of his electoral appeal. As the violence in Iraq appears to be subsiding, and with the economy rapidly becoming the issue of most concern to voters, Giuliani has begun to sound like a broken record when he talks of his performance as “America’s mayor”.

The "9/11 theme" has worn thin, no matter how powerful a message underlies its initial appeal.

Still, the strategic mistakes for Giuliani seem monumental, considering how basic the crucial importance of Iowa and New Hampshire are to students of political science. Titles to some of the basic texts in electoral studies - for example, Media and Momentum: The New Hampshire Primary and Nomination Politics - are a pretty clue to importance of the early contests in contemporary nomination politics (a quick Google search turns up more recent titles).

Sure, the journalists could be wrong. The former New York Mayor could pull out a dramatic win in one of the upcoming elections and sweep into contention on February 5. I'm not a betting man, but there'd be good odds against a Guiliani comeback.

Photo Credit: New York Times.