Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Vanity Fair does Crazy for Rudy.

No, that is wrong: virtually every Full Rudy veteran expects the implosion to happen any second. It's in some bizarro parallel reality that the Rudy campaign achieves verisimilitude and even—strange, too, when you consider the cronies and hacks who surround him—appears, at times, adept.

It's a Catch-22 kind of nuttiness. What with all his personal issues—the children; the women; the former wives; Kerik and the Mob; his history of interminable, bitter, asinine hissy fits; the look in his eye; and, now, Judi!, his current, prospective, not-ready-for-prime-time First Lady—he'd have to be nuts to think he could successfully run for president. But nutty people don't run for president—certainly they don't get far if they do.

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And, speaking of banana republics, there was Rudy's extra-legal plan to set aside the 2001 mayoral election (after his term limit had been reached, so he couldn't run again) and, by legislative acclamation (thwarted only at the last minute), extend his term.

Still, say what you want, Rudy's fearlessness or kookiness does break through the political clutter and leave a powerful impression—that may be the biggest part of the political job.

The wives: if Rudy's marital history isn't crazy, it's surely way over the line of middle-class domestic political norms. You can't marry your second cousin (Regina Peruggi, now president of Kingsborough Community College) and, on top of that, annul the deal, as though this were the 18th century. You can't, in a public snit, break up with your wife in a news conference (provoking that wife, Donna Hanover, to call a counter–news conference where she suggested he was a public liar and adulterer). You can't carry on, as we used to say, in front of everybody, not without some major contrition—not if you want a political future.

Or can you?

The bit about the Mayoral election is why I think the man is a dangerous figure, one without the fundamental small-d democratic DNA we desperately need in our leaders. Romney, Hagel, even Huckabee would be far less likely to do something really really weird to us.

Of course, that's not what the media are going to focus on. Nor the keeping his mistress on the city payroll (Wolfowitz, anyone?). No, they're getting all worked up about that story about Rudy and the Ferret.

When the campaign decided to do a hostile takeover of the all-volunteer Barack Obama MySpace page, the guy who set it up and got 150,000 friends (many sent over by the campaign), asked for $40,000 and a commission on future MySpace ads. It seems the campaign didn't counter-offer, it just got MySpace to give them control of the page address (but not its content or friends list). And now the campaign has to rebuild the list from scratch.

Jerome Armstrong writes Obama blows into MySpace. Here's the Barack Obama blog's discussion of the “new and improved” Obama MySpace page. And the Kossacks weigh in.

While not all the facts are clear, one obvious divide in all this is what the 'sweat equity' in building up a volunteer site based on a candidate's name is worth. Some say zero — the candidate has the moral and maybe legal rights to the use of his name (the law isn't so clear here, however. so long as there is no misrepresentation nor profiting going on, the use may be perfectly legal.) Others say that the failure to treat volunteers with the same consideration as media consultants when the volunteers deliver better goods is a sign of being behind the times.

If $40K was too much for a campaign with millions in the bank, a really smart candidate operation would have counter-offered a few bucks and dinner with the candidate…