Is Giuliani Serious?

The Politco ponders whether or not Rudy Giuliani is serious about running for President. Some snippets:

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is finally scrambling to beat back a crippling perception that his bid for president isn't quite serious. But even as he begins to hire aides and consultants, many of his New York supporters and critics, as well as neutral observers, see a repeat of his half-hearted, unfinished 2000 campaign for Senate...

The question for this year's Republican primary is whether voters can expect the Giuliani of his first winning campaign in 1993 -- a studious, disciplined, hard-working candidate -- or the indecisive, disorganized, reluctant candidate of 2000, carried by spectacular public polling and national Republican hopes toward a confrontation with Hillary Rodham Clinton until he flamed out in May.

To many in New York, it's starting to look like 2000 all over again with Giuliani drawing the biggest headlines of late when an aide lost possession of a binder containing detailed fund-raising plans and worries that his personal and business life could scuttle his campaign; that 140-page dossier, first published in the New York Daily News, is available online today at Politico.com...

That failure to build a national organization echoes 2000, in which Giuliani paid little attention to Upstate New York and ditched appearances in Rochester and Buffalo for a Yankees game. "He couldn't put together a statewide campaign in New York," scoffed on Democratic strategist active in the 2000 race. "Why would anyone think he could do so in the entire country?"

The link to the documents is here.

One of the things that never made sense about Giuliani's potential candidacy was the sheer fact that he is a very wealthy man who has made a ton in business. Running for President would, at best, inhibit his ability to run his companies or, at worse, severely cripple their future performance. And frankly, why would he want to subject his "American Hero" persona to the potential rigors and pitfalls of a Presidential campaign?

Maybe the organizational problems are the same as they were in 2000. The cancer scare from 2000 was ostensibly used back then as the reason Giuliani was leaving the Senate race but even then there was a sense, much like with Doug Duncan's withdrawal from the gubernatorial race last year, that there was something more to the story. The Giuliani campaign took a severe public relations blow when those documents went missing. Perhaps this is the first visible sign of a campaign that is not particularly held together very well.

Once again, it proves how important competent political organization and structure is to a campaign. If a campaign cannot stay on message and build an effective organization, there is not much that campaign can do to win; it will die a death of a thousand cuts...