The week is still young, but it's already been a bad one for Rudy Giuliani. Monday's big news was Slate outing his daughter Caroline as an Obama supporter. Ultimately more damaging, his former top anti-terror aide was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph saying Giuliani would make a "terrible president."
Jerome Hauer was New York's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000. Like firefighter-union officials before him, Hauer says Giuliani bears the blame for placing the city's crisis control room in the World Trade Center complex despite its having been the scene of a 1993 terror attack. Hauer says he wanted the control center in Brooklyn; Giuliani wanted it within walking distance of City Hall.
"Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am speaking now," Hauer told the Sunday Telegraph. "He's a control freak who micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational character trait and picks fights just to score points. He is the last thing this country needs as president right now." Hauer also dismissed Giuliani's claims that his wife, Judith, ran a family assistance center and gave crucial advice on terror after the attack. "Rudy told me to find a role for Judy. She came along to some meetings and her heart was in the right place, but it's baloney to suggest she ran the centre. And now he says he would take her advice on chemical and biological terrorism? Give me a break."
Hauer is a registered Democrat, but the Bush administration chose him to coordinate America's public health response planning for future emergencies in 2002.
The only good news for Rudy? Fred Thompson is stuck defending his wife, Jeri, after a disturbing Washington Post profile, while Mitt Romney is getting criticized for declaring his affection for a crackpot right-wing racist Mormon, W. Cleon Skousen, in a recent radio interview.
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