Unsolicited Advice for the Mayor

Now that the Republicans have muddled through the first two primaries with no conclusive front-runner, eyes are starting to turn back to Rudy Giuliani, who is waiting for the race to come to him in Florida.

The mayor has an unconventional strategy to say the least. On the one hand, by ignoring the small states, he avoids the attack ads and let his opponents weaken each other. But on the other hand, he has become an invisible man who has lost out on millions of dollars of free advertising. Both John McCain and Mike Huckabee have used the spotlight to give their campaigns a huge boost.

I have some unsolicited advice for the mayor as he waits for the race to come to him. He needs a new storyline that goes beyond his action in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sept. 11 introduced the mayor to many Americans as a man who can handle a crisis. But it has been overdone, and frankly, it is time for him to move on to a better narrative.

Giuliani is from Brooklyn, not Manhattan. While he may be a Yankees fan, his appeal is more Brooklyn Dodger. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Like Reagan, he is a former Democrat. He gets the ethnic mindset. He understands what it means to struggle to earn a living. He didn’t waltz into Harvard or Yale. He is no elitist.

Giuliani has been fighting for fair play and against the bullies his whole life. He took down the Mob when he was a prosecutor. There are no bigger bullies than a bunch of mobsters.

He made Wall Street cheats do the perp-walk. Humiliating people who stole millions of dollars from ordinary investors is not only fun, it is good politics. These fancy stockbrokers who ride in limousines and guzzle champagne as they steal from folks in the heartland, they deserve to do a perp-walk.

Giuliani took on the bureaucratic bullies who ran New York into the ground. Mike Bloomberg is basking in all the reflected glory of his predecessor, who made a lot of people mad when he fixed a broken city.

The top issue in this campaign is probably not going to be terrorism. It will be something else, probably something on the domestic front.

The best way for Republicans to get in the game on the domestic side is to talk about reform (or “change,” as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney call it).

Reform doesn’t just happen because people hope it to be so. Reform is a process of taking on the bullies and the cheaters and establishing a sense of fair play. Reforming Washington means taking on the bureaucracy and making sure the taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.

Rudy has the best track record of any candidate in taking on the cheaters and the bullies and forcing through change. It is a painful process, but when it works, it works fabulously. Just ask anybody who has been to New York lately.

This is just some unsolicited advice, but if Rudy wants to win, he needs to remind people that he was tough enough to change New York and that he is tough enough to change Washington.