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January 28, 2007
What's The Rush?

In a month where everyone and their brother has announced the creation of exploratory presidential committees, one man gets the New York Times' attention for not making a decision on entering the campaign ... even though he formed his committee last month. Rudy Giuliani gets the Gray Lady treatment for not doing what hardly anyone else has done -- explicitly declaring his candidacy (emphasis mine):

Rudolph W. Giuliani, who developed a national reputation for decisive and reassuring leadership after 9/11, now faces the odd challenge of having to reassure some supporters that he can be decisive about a very different issue: running for president.

Even as his fellow Republican John McCain and fellow New Yorker Hillary Rodham Clinton have all but formally declared their candidacies, Mr. Giuliani has proceeded more cautiously.

Since last month, he has formed an exploratory committee, more aggressively recruited a campaign staff and moved to divest himself of one of his companies. And he is now visiting New Hampshire, home to the first primary, for the second time in three months. But he has studiously avoided making a public commitment to run.

Oh, come on. Hillary announced that she's in, but hardly anyone else has done so. What everyone except Hillary has done has been to "aggressively recruited a campaign staff" after forming exploratory committees. How is this any different from Mitt Romney, McCain, or Mike Huckabee, who announced today?

This is nothing but a silly attempt by the New York Times to damage Giuliani's well-earned reputation for leadership. They're trying to paint him as vacillating and indecisive, when the entire nation watched Giuliani during the aftermath of 9/11 and saw for themselves his ability to make decisions and take responsibility for them. In doing so, they try to claim that his decision not to run against Hillary Clinton for her Senate seat in 2000 had more to do with political cowardice than with his diagnosis of prostate cancer and the effect that would have on his ability to campaign aggressively against her.

Sam Roberts loses sight of one important fact: it's only January 2007. In years gone by, candidates wouldn't have even begun putting together teams or forming exploratory committees at this stage. It would have waited until the summer, while they spent the winter and spring traveling, making speeches, and taking the temperature of places like Iowa and New Hampshire to see whether a Presidential run had any chance of success.

In fact, Giuliani has been doing all of the above, and he formed his exploratory committee ahead of most other candidates. Was Barack Obama being vacillating and indecisive because he formed his committee in January, after Giuliani did? I don't recall that being part of the Gray Lady's warm reception of Obama's entry into the race.

We know the NYT's editorial board has a long record of detesting Giuliani. It seems obvious that their attitude has infected their news division as well.

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Posted by Ed Morrissey at January 28, 2007 11:19 AM

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