Giuliani's Winds Down Campaign Day With Giants Game
POMPANO BEACH, FLA. -- "You're only gonna get four or five questions," Giuliani informed the press as he stepped onto their bus. "I'm going to watch the Giants game."
It's the first direct encounter we've had with Giuliani all day, after he attended mass, shook hands at a café, and waved at a parade in Little Havana.
While Romney bundles up in Michigan and McCain and Thompson brush off mosquitoes in sticky South Carolina, we're breaking a sweat outside Miami Beach, aboard a bus that usually carries the traveling cast of the musical "Gypsy."
Just after waving goodbye to a boisterous rally outside his Pompano Beach campaign office (the event was even catered by a restaurant called N.Y.P.D. Pizza), the former New York City mayor mopped the sweat from his brow and gathered before reporters for an unscheduled Q and A session.
The first question had to do with his reading at a church service at El Rey Jesus this morning, where he read a passage from Joshua: "Fear not, be strong and of good courage."
Giuliani had told the thousands of churchgoers, "That's the way to face the future."
Did the passage relate to the state of his political campaign?
"I chose it because I thought it gave us strength," responded Giuliani.
Squeezing every drop of strength into the next month is key for Giuliani now -- so much so that some members of the campaign are choosing to go without paychecks this month to keep the campaign ahead by a nose if the race comes close, as it likely will when February arrives.
"We're in good shape. We really are," Giuliani said about his financial situation. "People who did that did it out of an excess of generosity."
Asked if Giuliani is putting his own money into the campaign, he said "I never have."
"I believe that the way you run for office is you raise money, you've got to raise money among people, and you've got to have their support."
As the Michigan and South Carolina primaries draw near, with Florida following on January 29th, Giuliani finds himself in a politically uncomfortable position. From the snowy streets of Clive, Iowa to the hills of Manchester, N.H., the voters seem to say the same thing – "I'm either voting for Rudy Giuliani or John McCain."
While Giuliani maintains that he will not go after a fellow Republican unless they criticize his record, he would be even less inclined to do so with John McCain, who Giuliani views as a longtime friend and personal hero.
Therefore, it is hard to foresee Giuliani slowing a McCain lead down if his plan, for the time being, is not to provoke confrontation or contrast.
Despite McCain's win in New Hampshire being last week's news, Giuliani still continues to get questions about if he would have done anything differently in that state.
"You can't go back over the past," said Giuliani, returning the conversation to Florida. "This is the strategy we chose. This is the one that we're going to use. We believe in it, we believe it's going to work. Nobody knows what happens if you do something differently in the past."
Avoiding confrontation with a rival Republican, Giuliani congratulated a political comrade that he hopes must return the sentiment by month's end.
"I think John [McCain] won a very good victory there. He came from behind, he worked very very hard. We're trying to do that in Florida and we think we will."