American Politics Journal -- $40 Million Just Won't Be Enough



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$40 Million Just Won't Be Enough
Hillary Clinton Bleeds the NY GOP Dry As She Prepares to Clean Lazio's Clock
by Tamara Baker

Tuesday, May 23, 2000 -- Saint Paul, MN (AmpolNS) -- Gentle readers, some of you may be familiar with a neat guy who goes by the name of "Bartcop". He runs the best anti-Rush page in existence, and has a flair for distilling an issue down to its most basic lineaments. Tamara wishes she had Bartcop's gift for syntax.

Recently, Bartcop noted Rudy Giuliani's quitting the NY Senate race by sadly saying words to the effect that now his prediction that Hillary would beat Rudy now won't come true.

Guess what, Bartcop: you were right after all.

Hillary DID smash Rudy Giuliani.

Remember, they were going to run him for Senate anyway. He had the money, he had the friends, he had the ability to twist arms and "persuade" Tom-DeLay-style. He'd steamroll any of the local New York state talent, and both the Republicans and the Democrats knew this.

The sacrificial lamb the New York Dems were going to offer up against him was a little-known lady named Nita Lowey. Rudy wouldn't have needed to spend more than $10 million, tops, to crush her.

But Hillary entered the race -- and that changed EVERYTHING.

Suddenly, $10 million wasn't enough. The RNC put the word out nationwide to start funnelling money into Reichsmaior Rudy's coffers. Soon, he had $19 million built up -- and spent $10 million of it immediately.

But then, several things happened in rapid succession:

Patrick Dorismond's murder, and subsquent posthumous trashing, by Reichsmaior Rudy. This pretty much sealed his fate among New York City residents, and even caused some of the less law-and-order (read: racist) of the Upstate crowd to have serious doubts about Giuiliani's sanity.

The prostate cancer diagnosis. While this was initially hailed by many New York Republicans as a "good" thing, the fact that fighting cancer is a full-time job, and Rudy already having two full-time jobs (campaigning for the Senate and being NYC Mayor) on his plate, meant that something had to give. It also gave Rudy a convenient escape hatch down which he could disappear, taking the unspent $9 million left over from his aborted campaign with him.

I suspect that the stress of finding out that he has prostate cancer wound up distracting Rudy and causing him to behave in such a bizarre fashion that even conservative spin artists like Dr. Laura and Mary Matalin were chasing their tails trying to cover for him. His callously stupid trashing of Patrick Dorismond's memory was bad enough, and that occurred, presumably, before he knew he was sick. After the diagnosis, Rudy's behavior achieved levels of weirdness never before seen outside of the Texas legislature.

The culmination was when Rudy -- who had already managed to eliminate much of the automatic "sympathy vote" he got from the prostate-cancer announcement by immediately cutting NYC hospital funds for prostate-cancer treatment -- held a press conference to announce that he and his wife, NYC TV personality Donna Hanover, were separating (this occurred right after Rudy was seen openly flaunting his latest kept woman, Judi Nathan).

This would have been fine and dandy, except it seemed that, as a visibly outraged Ms. Hanover made clear in her own press conference, held almost immediately after Rudy's, Mayor Giuliani had never told her of his intention to junk their marriage.

As if that wasn't enough, Donna then went on to detail all the marital woes that the NY GOP had tried for so long to keep the upstate crowd from knowing about. This is what did it: here we had Rudy Giuliani, a man who touted his love of family and his morality, who advocated posting the Ten Commandments in the classrooms of New York, running against the "enabler" wife of the man the GOP promoted as the Worst Adulterer in History... and now everyone in the nation knew all about Christyne Lategano and Judi Nathan.

Rudy was doomed from that moment.

Now that he's gone, having flushed $19 million down the toilet, the NY GOP must hurry up and get $20 milllion more to put in Rick Lazio's coffers.

And Hillary, who forced Rudy to spend all that money in the first place, is the reason.

And she'll still win.