Running for political office - any political office - requires a healthy ego, and certainly anyone running for the highest office in the land has to have a supreme level of confidence that not only they're capable of the job, but that they can somehow convince the majority of this very large country that they can have the money, luck, skill set, discipline, support and a whole host of other attributes to achieve this searing experience.
Rudy Giuliani had this experience in 2007, and frankly, it didn't work out too well.
We write 2007 and not 2008 because other than for the first month of that year, he really wasn't much of a factor in the GOP race for president.
You might recall that even though his moderate stances on certain social issues made him a pariah in socially conservative states (which is why he bypassed Iowa), at this time four years ago a lot of political analysts pegged him as very possibly the GOP nominee in '08.
He was America's Mayor, after all, and a national hero in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Sure that was six and a half years earlier, but his reputation had really not been sullied (yet).
But Rudy's strategy of banking on Florida being the state that was going to catapult him in the national standings was a poor one, and he finished out of the running in the January 29, 2008 Florida primary, the one where John McCain beat out Mitt Romney in what ended up being Romney's swan song for viability in '08.
Giuliani spent a ton of money in the 07-08 cycle: a reported $55 million - and received zero delegates out of the process.
Since then America's Mayor hasn't really done much except continue to receive tens of thousands of dollars for speeches, and go on cable television news a lot to criticize Barack Obama. And it's been 14 years since he won any election, that being a second term for New York City mayor in 1997.
Dante Scala, associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, recently told the Boston Globe that Giuliani could also have a tough time as a former mayor competing against former governors.
“There was a lot of glamour that attached to him in ’08 as ‘America’s mayor. “That’s a decade old. It will be a bit tougher to run now.’’
Giuliani plans to go to New Hampshire next month, which would be his third visit to the state that will hold next year's first primary (after the Iowa caucus). Even though he spent millions of dollars and weeks in that state in '08, many analysts questioned how sincere he was in winning that state.
