ORLANDO, Fla.—“I think I’ve opened up the analysis and broadened the scope of the party, the way people look at the party,” Rudolph Giuliani said in an interview about an hour before the results of his underwhelming, and perhaps candidacy-ending, performance in the Florida primary on which he bet everything became known.
(At press time, with nearly 24 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Giuliani looked set to finish a distant third behind John McCain and Mitt Romney, with 16 percent of the vote.)
Speaking in a small office in his Orlando campaign headquarters, and fingering a pamphlet of his campaign promises (“12 commitments”) and a photocopied map of Florida, Mr. Giuliani said that he had helped the party accept a candidate who was not rigorously conservative on social issues. He also said that his candidacy had changed the way the country thought about the war on terrorism.
“Defining it as a terrorists’ war on us has changed to some extent the way we talk about the war on terror,” he said. “It’s helped to see it in the light of a war America doesn’t want.”
He added, “I wish we had been able, and we may still be able, to get school choice into the debate.”
In the 15-minute interview, the former mayor, wearing a white shirt and striped red tie, also said he felt he received tougher press coverage than his rivals in the Republican field.
“Because I came from New York, and because the New York press is so dominant, I think there was more coverage,” he said. “But I also was the front-runner. That might have something to do with it, too.
“The worst person to analyze coverage is you yourself, because you’re not objective about it.”
Mr. Giuliani wasn’t the only one in an introspective mood in the final hours before the Florida vote.
“It’s a combination of things,” said Tony Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s chief political strategist, in a diner in Sunny Isles Beach.
Mr. Carbonetti was explaining that Mr. Giuliani’s moderate social positions had forced the campaign’s hand on where to compete and where not to compete. “You cannot go back and say what if I did this, what if I did that,” he said. “You’d just torture yourself.”
When asked about the recriminations and shifting of blame that had already begun within the Giuliani team well before the vote in Florida—where the campaign had staked everything on a primary victory—Mr. Carbonetti said that every campaign had “different ideas,” and added that if there were any grievances from the Washington staff that had joined the core New York group, he was willing to absorb all the blame.
“Call me the political idiot,” he said. “It doesn’t change my life.”
For months, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign confounded the skeptics.
Before his lead in the national polls collapsed late last year, the 63-year-old former mayor’s stickiness at the front of the pack forced the Republican Party to question the long-held conventional wisdom that a Republican candidate needed to be staunchly pro-life, pro-gun, anti-immigration and anti-gay-marriage.
But in the final weeks, Mr. Giuliani’s thorough decline led to no small amount of soul-searching within the campaign over its unusual big- (and late-) state strategy.
His decision not to compete in early-voting primary states had utterly marginalized him: He went into Florida with only a single delegate to his name, and polls had begun to show him behind John McCain among Republicans even in New York.
The reality, as Mr. Giuliani might have said, was that by the time his primary-week bus tour through Florida got under way, it felt like a funeral procession.
After declaring himself an “underdog” on Saturday morning, Mr. Giuliani entered Orlando’s sprawling Rosen Centre Hotel for two campaign events. The first was a “Women for Rudy” rally. Most of the attendees were men. Some of the women were not necessarily for Rudy.
“Rudy didn’t make many waves,” said one attendee, Fay Bellamy, a 64-year-old retired law enforcement official from Orlando. “He stayed in the state of Florida a little bit too long. He should have gone out to other states. McCain did and that helped him.”
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