Kevin Drum makes an important point here. More often than not, when Rudy speaks, he makes it clear that he doesn't actually know what he is talking about. Today's tax cutting riff is just the latest example of this. Unfortunately, it seems that up until now most people have simply been willing to give him a pass. As one Democrat at the event said today, "I do think he may have misspoke."
Misspeaking is an explanation, not an excuse. Or rather, the fact that he misspoke shouldn't excuse his behavior. If campaigns and elections mean anything, we have accept that the things that candidates say matter. When they make mistakes, and particularly when they make factual mistakes, we shouldn't simply write them off as irrelevant mistakes. To do so is to suggest that knowledge about the world isn't relevant to presidential success. I know people once made that argument, but is there actually anyone left today who still does?
An isolated incident is one thing. But Rudy does this all the time (no, really, he does), and in this case, it was an entirely unforced error. This wasn't a gotcha moment; Rudy actually chose to say these things.
And Rudy isn't alone in making these mistakes. Fred Thompson has been so full of them these past few weeks that I honestly don't have the time to chronicle them. He doesn't know about the protests in Jena, nor what people are protesting about. He wants to - maybe - drill for oil inside the Everglades. He thinks we should stop allowing Cuban refugees into the country because they might be here to deliver a suitcase nuke from Castro. And best of all, he cares about Social Security reform because he hopes one day soon to be retired.
But has any of this become the standard narrative for either candidate? Of course not. Today's NYT, for example, gives us another lengthy "Giuliani 9/11" expose, one that oh so passively declares: "In 9/11 Chaos, Giuliani Forged a Lasting Image"
Giuliani didn't "forge" that image. The media "forged" that image for him. And to this day they continue to do it. Here's how the NYT leads today's story:
That first tower toppled at 9:59 a.m., a billion pounds of steel and concrete and bodies raining down. Smoke billowed like thunderheads, and New York’s mayor seemed to disappear into death’s maw.
“We really didn’t know what had become of the mayor,” he said. “I spoke to Governor Pataki, and we closed the schools and canceled the election.”Then Mr. Giuliani was led through a basement and out onto Church Street, his head and shoulders dusted white with ash. He walked north into the surreal brightness of that day, comforting a police officer and dragooning reporters.
He would walk north two miles, pausing in the bay of a deserted fire station in Greenwich Village to call a television station and urge calm. Three hours later he stepped into a press conference with Gov. George E. Pataki.
“Today is obviously one of the most difficult days in the history of the city,” he said softly. “The tragedy that we are undergoing right now is something that we’ve had nightmares about. My heart goes out to all the innocent victims of this horrible and vicious act of terrorism. And our focus now has to be to save as many lives as possible.”
Inevitably the question arose: How many lost? The mayor looked up through his glasses, aware that among the viewers of this live broadcast were the mothers, fathers, spouses, lovers and children of those who labored in the smashed towers.
“The number of casualties,” he said, “will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”
That walk north, the spareness of his words and his passion became the founding stones in the reconstruction of the mayor’s reputation, transforming him from a grouchy pol slip-sliding into irrelevancy to the Republican presidential candidate introduced as America’s mayor. The former mayor has made this day the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, aware that millions of Americans hold that heroic view in their collective mind’s eye.
Political leadership is an uncertain alchemy, an admixture of the symbolic and substantive and the visceral. In times of consuming trauma, psychologists and historians say, a leader must speak with a trusted voice and sketch honestly the painful steps to safety. A leader must weave a narrative of shared loss while acknowledging consuming anger.
All this Mr. Giuliani accomplished, mourning the dead, comforting the grieving and cheering the living even as the police and the National Guard moved in. His critics have lambasted the rescue failures at ground zero and argued that his inattention before 9/11 cost lives.
It's so wonderfully stirring that you can't help but hear the swelling strings in the background. The only problem, of course, is that as the article eventually gets around to pointing out, its a facade that hides the truth about what actually happened on that horrific day. But to learn that you have to read more than halfway though that story. And those who stop short, of course, will be left with nothing but those strings.
The creation of The Myth of Rudy isn't something that just "happened," and it is not something that Rudy did on his own. The myth is a creation of the media first and foremost, a phenomenon that Rudy has embraced and encouraged, but one that he in no way created on his own.
Shouldn't the New York Times, the nation's premiere newspaper, understand this? Our media isn't independent from the political process. And it isn't just a part of it. It is deeply embedded in it, the infrastructure upon which our entire system of politics has been built. They don't report on the process. They actually help make it happen. And although I realize that this idea violates all of the basic tenets of modern journalism, that does not for a minute mean that it is not true.
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