Rudy Doesn't Do Retail.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Rudy Giuliani - Essay

I caught up with Rudy Giuliani in Iowa just after his surprise endorsement by Pat Robertson.

The other big news of the day was the indictment of Rudy's former business partner, New York City police commissioner, and ill-fated nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, Bernard Kerik.

Which of these two faces from the rogues' gallery of Republican politics would have the biggest impact on the man campaigning for President of 9/11?

The televangelist who agreed with Jerry Falwell two days after 9/11 that the whole thing was God's punishment for a culture that tolerates gays, lesbians, feminism, abortion, and liberal judges?

Or the corrupt crony charged with tax evasion and taking illegal loans from a mob-connected construction firm, who used an apartment donated to the Ground Zero recovery effort to carry on his extra-marital affairs?

From Iowa, the Robertson endorsement looked like a flash in the pan. I asked Ann Jorgensen, the northeast Iowa chair of the Giuliani campaign, if it would help her candidate with social conservatives. She rolled her eyes. "Probably not," she said.

The Christian Right, as everyone in Iowa knows, is split among Romney, Thompson, and Huckabee. Anyone But Giuliani is the unofficial slogan of a group of Iowans who signed the "conservative Declaration of Independence" started by a former Christian Coalition field director in Michigan, Tom McMillin. "As conservatives in Iowa learn that Giuliani supports government-funded abortion, partial-birth abortion, homosexual marriage, and gun registration," McMillin writes on his website, "they quickly agree that we need this Declaration of Independence."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Kerik, on the other hand, could have a lasting effect on Giuliani. He was, after all, a close friend. He named Rudy the godfather of two of his children, and Rudy named a jail after him. (The current mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, peeled Kerik's name off the jail after the indictment.) Kerik's trial will likely take place during the peak of the general election campaign, featuring testimony from Giuliani aides. And the scandal has a juicy angle, with rightwing publisher Judith Regan recounting her trysts at the Ground Zero apartment.

At the very least, the Kerik news didn't exactly burnish the campaign's central theme in Iowa: that Giuliani is a great manager and tough on crime.

But it did shed some light on the candidate's theatrics.

Looking slightly harried, with a forced grin on his face, a short, stocky Giuliani strode into a large common room on the University of Northern Iowa campus in Cedar Falls to modest applause. He quickly introduced two friends and former colleagues, the ex-U.S. attorneys from Chicago and Los Angeles, Dan...