Talking points

From the magazine

It’s hard to say which was more bizarre, said the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times in an editorial: Rudy Giuliani “kissing up” to the National Rifle Association or interrupting his speech to take a cell phone call from his wife. As mayor of New York City, Giuliani supported a ban on assault weapons and filed a lawsuit seeking to hold gun manufacturers liable for the violence inflicted with their products. He even called the NRA “extremists.” Now, of course, he’s the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, and gun owners are a crucial GOP constituency. So appearing before the gun lobby last week, Giuliani was in “all-out retreat,” pledging to appoint judges who respect gun rights, expressing regret over that lawsuit, and claiming that somehow, 9/11 “highlights the necessity for Second Amendment rights.” Huh? Then the cell phone in Giuliani’s pocket rang, and to everyone’s astonishment, he jumped into an embarrassingly sugary conversation with his wife, Judith, punctuated by several dears and I love yous. Maybe his wife called to beg Rudy “to stop talking while he still had some dignity left.”

Whatever Mrs. Giuliani said, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, her husband’s decision to take a call in the middle of a speech left the audience flabbergasted. “Was it creepy, cute, staged, spontaneous, rude, awkward, or downright weird?” Some pundits were certain it was a prearranged campaign stunt, designed “to humanize the dictatorial former mayor,” whose abrupt dumping of his first two wives hasn’t exactly endeared him to either women or conservative values voters. Then again, maybe, Giuliani is simply afraid to anger the mercurial Judith by not picking up the phone. Oh, it had to be “an act,” said the New York Daily News. At least we hope so. Otherwise, if Giuliani makes it to the White House, must we worry whether the first lady “might ring up Giuliani” any old time—say, during a summit meeting with the president of China?

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Funny things happen when politicians run for president, said Ellis Henican in Newsday. Their wives call at convenient moments or they experience “just-in-time epiphanies” about guns, God, or Iraq that magically align them with their party’s base. Mitt Romney discovered he was no longer pro-choice and John McCain stopped worrying about the “intolerance” of the Christian right. Now that Iraq has gone sour, the once-hawkish Hillary Clinton has decided our troops should come home as soon as possible. To run for president, it appears, you have to be able to spell “P-A-N-D-E-R.”