On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, Brad De Long wrote:
> Well if it's in a very, very early stage there's no problem: he just
> starts taking his estrogen shots and lives for decades and decades...
Exactly. Which he has to know. What struck me is that he announced it immediately, which doesn't fit what you'd expect. He's a very ambitious man, and I think an ambitious man would wait a bit and cover his cards consult everybody under the sun and think about his options. Also he's famous for his close-lipped reticence about his private life.
But many people have speculated in the last month that Rudy doesn't seem to want the Senate job. He'd rather stay Mayor, but he can't because of term limits. He'd love to be governor, and he really wants to be president -- any executive job where he can be boss and where it's possible to rule by confrontation. The Senate job -- being 1 of a hundred, and being a very powerful 1 -- doesn't fit his profile at all. But it was the only job available at the time.
Since then, his lack of enthusiasm for campaigning upstate (the sign of seriousness in a New York State campaign) has been so extremely marked that many otherwise sensible people have been speculating that he might find some excuse to pull out of the race, even though on the face of it that would seem undoable at this point. The question of course was how he could pull it off without enraging allies and branding himself an untrustworthy flit. This, I think, presents the perfect excuse. He might still be thinking about it. But I think the speed with which he blurted it out was an expression of his true feelings. And personally I'm guessing that he's actually already planned it out, including the couple of weeks to let speculation build before he steps down. I think it's a godsend for him. He can leave the campaign without anyone being able to say he didn't anything wrong, and then when the governorship opens up, he not only has his 18 million, he has a sympathy backstory. And an overcoming backstory for that matter, even if it's only about the wonders of modern medicine.
By the way, do those estrogen treatments affects a person's personality at all? Lord knows Rudy could do with some dampening of his testosterone.
My friend Nicole thinks that he will play it for sympathy during this campaign. But that doesn't me strike right. If that was his purpose, I think he would have waited to time it at a more important moment than 7 months before the election. But of course I could be completely wrong.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com