The Daily Background

Smart bloggers and blog readers have noticed that…

… Unlike virtually any other Republican hopeful who is already up and running, Rudy Giuliani’s exploratory committee website (launched just yesterday) does not list “immigration reform” as one of his top issues. No candidate from a city as diverse as NYC would be caught dead with that kind of thing on their front page. Smart bloggers and blog readers have also noticed that the front page of his website only uses his last name once, and in small letters at the very bottom in a disclosure mandated by FEC rules. Besides that small legal line at the bottom, it’s Rudy this, Rudy that. Even his website url is JoinRudy2008.com (though this is extremely smart, considering how difficult it is to spell his last name-I can personally attest to this as I write this very post).

Smart bloggers and blog readers have also noticed that…

… It’s Rudy, not Rudolph. His strategists know that America does not elect reindeer as Presidents, just as well as they know that America (and the press) does America like abbreviated versions of names (Condi Rice, Bill Clinton, to choose a couple popular ones).

Speaking of Giuliani (hey, I got it on the first try this time), the Washington Post ran a front page article Tuesday about Giuliani’s primary hurdle. They titled it… Giuliani’s Primary Hurdle (Smart bloggers and blog readers have already caught the title’s dual meaning). Here is the thrust of the piece, penned by Michael Powell and WaPo political blogger Chris Cillizza (which is about 8 times harder to spell than Giuliani, I can promise you).

… conservative party strategists and activists in key primary states are skeptical and warn that the socially liberal Republican faces a difficult campaign. They question whether a Republican who has had one marriage end in annulment and another in divorce, and favors abortion rights, gun control and immigrant rights, has much retail appeal in the evangelical and deeply conservative reaches of the GOP.

“If the Republican Party wants to send the social conservatives home for good, all they have to do is nominate Rudy Giuliani,” said Rick Scarborough, a Southern Baptist minister and president of Vision America. “It’s an insult to the pro-Christian agenda. . . . He’s going to spend a lot of money finding he can’t get out of the Republican primaries.”

[…]
“If they put the Northern states early, he becomes formidable because he’s the unquestioned hero in the first shot of the war on terror,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic consultant. “If I’m a Republican consultant, I wait until the Southern primaries and blow him up on social issues: the he divorce, the annulment, posing in drag at the party at City Hall.”

I originally touched upon these topics in a late November post entitled “The two 2008 Republican Presidential front-runners are hardly traditional conservatives,” which also mentioned some of John McCain’s traits that may make him less desirable to the most conservative of his party. And the way the GOP’s primaries are structured, it’s the white southern conservatives who are making the big 2008 decisions. To it’s credit, the Democratic party has been working to add more politically, ethnically, geographically and culturally diverse early primary electorate in recent years by changing the order in which they hold primaries.

Filed under: Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog