But by amplifying his charge that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appears ready to risk sullying the powerful mythology that grew around his leadership when he steadied and steeled the nation in the terrible, confusing time after 9/11.
Since those fleeting days when he was a unifying figure, Giuliani has more often dealt in waspish rhetoric and savage mockery — especially of a president he says has “failed.”
“America’s Mayor” has gone rogue, lashing out at Democrats and liberal orthodoxy on the war on terror and saying, for example, during the Ferguson controversy last year that the biggest danger to a black child was not from a white police officer but from another African American.
The latest firestorm over Obama’s patriotism may complete Giuliani’s political journey from the center left of the Republican Party to the conservative jungles where Sarah Palin and Donald Trump roam.
READ: Giuliani puts 2016ers in a bind
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“People tonight should say a prayer, for the people that we have lost, and be grateful that we are all here,” he said in a late night press conference 12 hours after the Twin Towers came crashing down in a toxic cloud of fire and ash. “Tomorrow New York is going to be here and we are going to rebuild and we are going to be stronger from before.”
Making Giuliani its Man of the Year, Time Magazine said: “When the day of infamy came, Giuliani seized it as if he had been waiting for it all his life.”
But he struggled to meet huge expectations. His 2008 presidential campaign was a bust, plagued by poor organization and his liberal views on social issues that conflicted with the conservative base.
But there was also a sense that he was playing the September 11 card too much: Joe Biden’s crack that there were “only three things he mentions in a sentence, a noun a verb and 9/11” was funny because it bore more than a ring of truth.
That was years ago now. But while his years of elective office are behind him, Giuliani still seems to pine for the political spotlight. So he has every incentive to keep this row going as long as he can.
