America, Meet Rudy.
The time has come to find out if that conventional wisdom holds up. The media has begun talking Rudy, and the coverage has focused on the fact that he's not the man many people think he is. In a cover story last week, New York Magazine asked simply, "Him?" And now Newsweek offers its cover story, with its tagline "The Real Rudy."
"Giuliani is a social moderate running in a party dominated by Christian conservatives; he supports gay rights and gun control, and hopes to be his party's first pro-choice presidential nominee since Gerald Ford more than 30 years ago," writes Jonathan Darman. "His tenure at city hall—in which he donned fishnet stockings to dance alongside the Rockettes and sauntered for the press corps as a pink-chiffon-clad Marilyn Monroe—is a case study in why no New York City mayor has gone on to higher office since 1868."
The question of whether Giuliani can overcome his past and ride to the nomination on the strength of his Sept. 11 leadership has, in fact, become the dominant storyline of his campaign. Journalists have been champing at the bit to unveil the Rudy they know to the world – on Sept. 10, he was "just another tired mayor with a bad marriage," according to Newsday's Ellis Henican, and New York City's reporters have long spoken of Giuliani's anger and short fuse. Now that Newsweek has brought "The Real Rudy" to mailboxes and doctor's office waiting rooms around the country, we'll get to see whether or not this passage from the New York Magazine story says it all:
I ask Max Kaster, a local pastor and party chair for Calhoun County, a half-hour south of Columbia [South Carolina], what people down here would think of America's Mayor if they knew he had moved in with a gay couple after separating from his second wife. "Really?" Kaster says. He fiddles with a lapel pin that combines an American flag and a cross. "I think that would roll a lot of people's socks down."