Ground Game

My fellow CQ Politics blogger Craig Crawford has been following the story surrounding Rudy Giuliani’s questionable use of New York City security funds for personal travel.

Crawford says Giuliani has so far offered a “good enough excuse for the weird accounting practices,” but “the excuse is not good enough to repair the potential damage to his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.”

By this point, most Republican voters following the primary campaign are aware of Giuliani’s moderate to liberal record on social issues. That alone appears to be Giuliani’s greatest hurdle toward securing his party’s nomination. But Crawford says there is potential for far greater fallout because many of those same Republican primary voters don’t know the alleged and confirmed details of Giuliani’s personal life when he was mayor of New York City:

“There are still plenty of GOP voters outside New York who have not heard the sordid details about Giuliani’s personal life in those days (which, by the way, is the reason that his children barely speak to him). And stories like this, even if you accept his explanations for how the expenses were handled, only serve to introduce the dirty details to voters around the country.”

It plays into a common thread by Rudy's critics: the more you know about him, the less you find to like.

Still, it remains to be seen how much life this story will have in the traditional media. But the story is not likely to go away anytime soon in the blogosphere, where liberals are seizing the moment to highlight what they consider Giuliani’s greatest liability: himself.

Over at AMERICAblog, Joe Sudbay writes: "Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. The GOP front-runner is in BIG trouble. He's got a major scandal on his hands -- having taxpayers finance his affair probably won't go over so well with the GOP voters. Just imagine how insane the right wingers would be if a Democrat pulled a stunt like that and also tried to cover it up. So, let's get cranking."