How Rudy Giuliani Blew The Race

Reading through today's commentary on the presidential race, we were struck by two statistics that neatly illustrate how Rudy Giuliani and his campaign "brain"trust have blown the race through pure incompetence.

The first is from the Project For Excellence In Journalism's index of media exposure for the major candidates during the past week, in which Giuliani got far less free media exposure than McCain, Romney or Huckabee, or even John Edwards, copping just about 5% of the stories.

It's been like that for Giuliani for several weeks now--as if he put a self-imposed media blackout on his campaign. For someone running out of money, that's not a smart thing to do.

The second is from a detailed Pew poll (highlighted in a blog post from Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics showing that Giuliani has a 67% net favorable rating among supporters of John McCain. Just so you know, that's extremely high and basically indicates that McCain voters are also favorably disposed to Giuliani.

If McCain wins it all, it will because Giuliani refused to confront him in the early contests, thereby letting McCain drain away Rudy's base of support. At this point, Rudy must attack McCain in Florida and hit him hard if he wants any chance of succeeding. He can't just be a "me too" to McCain--he'll have to show the voting constituency that they share that Rudy is the better choice.

Rudy wouldn't be in this predicament, however, if he hadn't shied from the fight. He badly needs for either Huckabee (or Thompson, however unlikely that is) to beat McCain in SC. At the same time, Thompson is dragging Huckabee down--they, too, share a lot of the same base--and opening the way for McCain, although it will be a close one.

One last comment, this one on Thompson: his people are saying the Fredster needs a "strong" showing in SC, which they explain as second place. Second place? That's so lame. What would that prove? Only that Fred can't win anywhere, except maybe Tennessee. He needs to win in SC. He should have recognized that all along and built a strategy around it, but instead he's just bumbled around the country.