Rudy, a private citizen, cannot claim credit for having done anything in the government since leaving the NYC mayoralty in January 2002. The attractiveness of New York tends to diminish the further away one is from the Big Apple. Also, while the Twin Towers have become Ground Zero, NYC has recovered well and a good recovery tends to lessen the perceived severity of any injury. Giuliani must somehow connect his experiences in the late 1990s with present-day concerns. As he trumpets the practical effectiveness of things he did then, so must he give specifics for what he wants to do now. Not easily done. I recall John Kerry's acceptance speech at the 2004 DNC convention when he spent considerable time justifying his presidential bid on what he did during his Vietnam tour of duty over 30 years earlier. Kerry had a sentence that the lessons he learned then would help us today. And went no further. His continuing failure to connect past experience to present realities cost him dearly. Rudy runs the same risk of becoming a candidate whose political future resides in the past.
