On Mon, 8 May 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:
> There's also Rudy Giuliani, busily upholding public morality, while
> carrying on multiple adulterous liaisons.
Multiple? Or serial?
To be fair to Rudy, he's a fascist and a racist, but does he really qualify as a tradvalue guy? Or does Bill Clinton, for that matter? I thought support for gay rights and abortion rights pretty much drummed them out of that club.
Rudy put this affair into play himself, and the most interesting thing about it is how sharply it distinguishes him from upstate tradvalue Republicans. In the city, people don't care about these things. Rudy hasn't been seen with his wife in years and everyone knows he doesn't wear a marriage ring. He's always quashed inquiry and it's never been news. But now, when he's in a statewide campaign, and where upstaters have been worrying for some time whether he was really one of them, this a slap in the face that makes it clear he's not -- none of them would make such a thing public during a campaign. (As a refugee from upstate put it to me, if people there have to choose between the aggrieved woman and the philadering man, don't think they're going to choose the one that's had the fun.) And it's doubly weird to reveal such things just when he's courting the Conservative Party line. Mike Long is a real tradvalue guy, and this will make it harder for him to give the line to Rudy.
I dunno. Maybe he felt impelled to quash speculation that his marital problems stem from a (prostate cancer induced) inability to get it up? It's yet another in a series of signs of ambivalence toward running, even while it seems more and more likely that he will go through with it.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com