After the dropouts

President McCain? Or Queen Hillary? Henry Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war that it’s a shame they both can’t lose. Conservatives have a slightly different problem: It’s a shame neither of them will lose — that, regardless of who takes the oath come next January, the harmonious McCain-Clinton consensus policies on illegal immigration and Big Government solutions to global warming will prevail.

Where’s Neither-Of-The-Above when you need him? Alas, the only Neither-Of-The-Above in the offing is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose candidacy would change shake things up only insofar as we would all suddenly be demanding: OK, where’s None-Of-The-Above when you need him? Mr. Bloomberg is a former Democrat, former Republican and current Independent, if by “Independent” you mean “Man who agrees with the conventional wisdom on illegal immigration, global warming, health care and everything else.”

Democracies get the political leaders they deserve, and that’s particularly true in the United States, where the primary system allows rank-and-file citizens to choose not merely which party to vote for (as in Britain, Canada and Europe) but also which individuals will be the candidates of those parties. True, it helps to be wealthy — up to a point.

But it wasn’t enough for John Edwards, the curiously unconvincing “angry populist” muttering darkly that “they” would never stop him telling the truth about 9-year-old girls shivering without a winter coat because daddy had been laid off at the mill. “They” didn’t need to stop him. The champion of America’s mythical Coatless Girl laid himself off last week. High on a hill, the Lonely Coatherd suddenly realized he was yodeling to himself.

Yet Mr. Edwards can’t even claim the consolation prize of Most Inept Candidate of 2008. The Rudy Giuliani campaign went from national front-runner to total collapse so spectacularly that they’ll be teaching it in Candidate School as a cautionary tale for decades to come.

As each state’s date with destiny loomed, Mr. Giuliani retreated, declining to compete in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina. “America’s Mayor” turned out to be Hizzoner of a phantom jurisdiction — a national front-runner but a single-digit asterisk in any state where any actual voters were actually voting.

Mr. Giuliani’s fate unnerves me because, unlike the Coatless One, Rudy had the support of a lot of my columnar confreres: John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary; Andy McCarthy and Lisa Schiffren at National Review; and David Frum, author of the new book “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again.” Yet the candidate took off and barely cleared the perimeter fence before nosediving into the sod.

Rudy’s views on abortion were always going to be a deal-breaker for a key segment of the Republican base. And his views on gun control were likewise beyond the pale for another big faction. That didn’t leave much except his clean-up of New York (whose problems were blessedly alien to most Americans) and, more recently, his “war on terror” credentials, which boils down to his marvelous performance on September 11, 2001, barreling through the dust-choked streets of Lower Manhattan and showing leadership amidst the chaos — plus a splendid coda a couple of weeks later when he told some unsavory Saudi prince where to take his gazillion-dollar donation. Every malign check from the House of Saud ought to meet the same fate: Perhaps we could have a constitutional amendment to that effect.

As for his performance on September 11, well, yes, he was good and he was effective on a day when so many agencies of government, at least at the federal level, had failed spectacularly — Federal Aviation Administration, Immigration and Naturalization Service, FBI, CIA, all the fancy-pants money-no-object acronyms, none of whose mediocrities paid any political price for their failures. If you want a typical September 11, 2001, performance, consider this official transcript:

“FAA Command Center: ‘Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?’

“FAA Headquarters: ‘God, I don’t know.’

“FAA Command Center: ‘That’s a decision somebody’s going to have to make, probably in the next 10 minutes.’

“FAA Headquarters: ‘You know, everybody just left the room.’ ”

A year earlier, Rudy had been in full public meltdown. His wife found out she was heading for divorcee status from a mayoral press conference. But, unlike so many public officials on September 11, in his rendezvous with history, Rudy Giuliani rose to the occasion. You would hope that would not be so exceptional, but apparently it is.

In contrast to the moral clarity Rudy showed in returning the Saudi check, the repugnant mayor of London, after the 2005 Tube bombings, artfully tried to draw a distinction between Muslim terrorists blowing up his own public transit (which he didn’t approve of) and Muslim terrorists blowing up Israeli public transit (to which he was inclined to be sympathetic).

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