Rudy Giuliani isn’t worried about an embarrassing fifth sixth place finish in Iowa with a poor finish in New Hampshire looming — he was there on 9/11, damn it!
He flatlined in Iowa and he’s struggling in New Hampshire, but Rudy Giuliani shook off the early-state blues Thursday as only he can.
“None of this worries me – Sept. 11, there were times I was worried,” Giuliani said.
“We’re sitting in a pretty good position right now. So we’re not worried and not concerned,” he told a news conference here. “Maybe other people acted nervous in a situation like this, but this is not unexpected.”
Pardon me for not swooning.
It’s true, of course, that Giuliani eschewed campaigning in Iowa in favor of a “big state strategy.” So far, that’s not looking so good in the polls but time will tell soon enough. But John McCain and Fred Thompson largely skipped the Hawkeye State, too, and managed respectable totals. Giuliani, meanwhile, barely edged out Duncan Hunter and saw his vote trebled by Ron Paul.
But, please, it’s simply unseemly to keep invoking the 9/11 attacks for even the most trivial matters.
As Steven Taylor observes, “Giuliani is starting to sound like a senile old war veterans who can only talk about the day he had to jump out of flaming bomber while Japanese Zeros tried to shoot him from the sky.” Of course, grandpa at least had to undertake personal risk for that story; Giuliani just walked around in a suit.
Taylor and Sully employ the obvious Joe Biden reference. Biden might be out of the race much sooner than the target of his barb but it remains the best line of the campaign to date.
