Will Rudy Be as Bulletproof as Bill Clinton?

As the year began, the Giuliani campaign seemed doomed by its own lost playbook, which listed his liabilities in bullet form: his third marriage after publicly cheating on his second wife; his consulting business with a less-than-sterling partner, Bernard Kerik; his liberal positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control, to say nothing of a New York style that might not charm red-states residents.

Yet here he is at year's end leading in the polls, the cross-dresser darling of the Religious right, with even the redoubtable Frank Rich in his Sunday Times column reduced to citing Judith Regan as the "silver bullet" that might pierce the heart of his campaign.

Not likely. More and more, Rudy is resembling the Bill Clinton of 1992, who (with an assist from you-know-who) survived his Gennifer Flowers scandal and went on to overcome stories of smoking marijuana ("I didn't inhale") and dodging service in Vietnam.

Now, as Hillary Clinton takes flak for not making her First Lady papers public fast enough, Giuliani is skating past complaints about moving 2,100 boxes of documents from his tenure as mayor to his own tax-exempt foundation before turning them back to the city. Only the mildest of questions has been raised about the papers, which include 9/11 records, being "sanitized" for campaign purposes.

After a media makeover, the current Mrs. Giuliani has emerged to make her first political speech, to an audience of cancer advocates, describing her not-then husband's reaction to hearing the news about his own in 2000.

The campaign's Southern strategy has worked well enough to bring Pat Robertson on board, even after having to dump Louisiana Sen. David Vitter of D.C. Madam fame and a South Carolina chairman accused of dealing cocaine.

After all this and more mishaps, any Judith Regan revelations from her pillow talk with Kerik and about the Murdoch empire's attempts to protect America's Mayor from gossip seem unlikely to derail him.

Only Mitt Romney's money and Iowa voters' orneriness might slow Rudy down. But then again, he could take heart from Bill Clinton's 1992 pattern, when the "Comeback Kid" bypassed Iowa and lost in New Hampshire but still went on to run the table of later primaries and get the nomination.

If the Giuliani campaign needs money, they might want to consider auctioning off signed copies of that lost playbook to die-hard supporters who have faith Rudy will prove it wrong.

First Ladies in a Fix

The Washington Post today ruminates about the role of Presidential spouses and concludes that they, well, differ from those of the past.

They sure do. In half a century as an editor, I knew First Ladies from Eleanor Roosevelt to Nancy Reagan, both of whom wrote for me. They differed from one another back then, too, but what they had in common was, after Mrs. Roosevelt, they had little to say about policy issues--in public.

But now, according to a professor of government quoted by the Post, “there is a greater acceptance of assertive women that is consistent with other societal trends. But there is still a divide in the country in what people want and expect. Look at how much people like Laura Bush."

First Ladies were in a bind back then, and they still are today. How much resentment of Hillary Clinton comes from the fact that in 1992 she said she was not the little woman who bakes cookies and stands by her man? She wasn’t, isn’t and is now running for President on her own, but some voters will never forgive her for not being Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan.

For other spouses, it’s still like walking a tightrope. Shouldn’t Michelle Obama have kept her high-powered job instead of helping her husband? Is Jeri Thompson too involved in Fred’s campaign? Is Elizabeth Edwards too outspoken? Does Judith Giuliani ring Rudy’s cell phone at the wrong time? What gives with Elizabeth Kucinich’s pierced tongue?

Today some of them will be talking about all this on TV with Maria Shriver, who as the wife of Governor Arnold and the niece of Jack Kennedy, knows a little something about the subject.

In 1960, when I sent a reporter to interview her aunt, Jacqueline Kennedy, she sounded like a Stepford wife: "The most important thing for successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well. The wife's satisfactions will follow...If the wife is happy, full credit should be given to the husband because the marriage is her entire life."

She never deviated from this submissive line, but even then, it wasn’t simple. When the reporter was about to leave, Mrs. Kennedy looked him in the eye and said, "But I'm smarter than Jack, and don't you forget it."

The Judi and Jeri Shows

Now this is new: two leading Presidential candidates trying to sell their second and third wives as First Lady to Republican voters, whose family values embrace “secondary virginity.”

In the New York Times, the Giulianis re-introduce Judith, nee Judi, to offset a Vanity Fair profile that portrays her as a pushy adventuress who insists on an extra airline seat for her Louis Vuitton handbag and who, as the Mayor’s girlfriend, swept into the first 9/11 anniversary memorial ceremony at Ground Zero with a police detail that shoved Hillary Clinton aside.

“I try to remain me,” she told the Times, but to avoid “making myself in any way a distraction from what my husband is trying to do for America.”

The Judi makeover will have to overcome the image of the next First Lady as a twice-married mother meeting her then-married husband at a cigar bar and embarking on a public affair that led to a contentious divorce and alienation from his two grown children. That, along with Mrs. Giuliani’s penchant for high living and tendency to terrorize his staff, might just turn out to be a “distraction.”

But in the interfering-wife department, she is being overshadowed by Mrs. Fred Thompson, whose dominance in the actor-senator’s still unannounced campaign now has a name, the Jeri Factor, to describe her involvement in every detail. The new issue of Newsweek describes her as his "top political adviser and de facto campaign manager."

With disappointing fund-raising figures, Thompson is still running a close second to Giuliani in the polls but among other distractions, his politically savvy but photogenically sexy “trophy wife” is becoming an issue with Republicans who want to see him as the true-conservative alternative to Giuliani.

Mrs. Thompson might benefit from the advice of a former girl friend of her husband’s, country singer Lorrie Morgan, who wrote in her memoir:

“Fred let me know that it was important how I dressed. Sedate was in...with men who had big wallets and insecure wives, wives who were a little older than I was. So get that basic black dress out of the closet. And no cleavage, baby.”

Stay tuned. With the three Democratic front runners still in their first marriages, the Judy and Jeri Shows may draw ratings in the fall TV season to rival “Desperate Housewives.”