By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Does America's Mayor want to be America's President?

Poll after poll suggests that Rudy Giuliani has a serious shot at winning his party's nomination, and therefore the presidency, despite his abortion rights/gay rights/gun control baggage.

But listening to Giuliani's lackluster speech to a conservative group last week, I was not convinced that he craves the job -- or that he has a particular vision of what he'd do if he got it.

For the party of orderly succession, this is an odd presidential season. Not only is there no Republican heir apparent, none of the three leading contenders presents anywhere near a perfect fit with his party's base voters.

They are a political Goldilocks story, except that for many Republican voters, none of these three bears feels just right: Mitt Romney is too flip-floppy; Giuliani too liberal; John McCain too much of a maverick, simultaneously mistrusted for his previous deviations (campaign finance, immigration) and saddled with his embrace of an unpopular war.

As former Arkansas governor and long-shot presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee told the Conservative Political Action Conference about the 2008 campaign, "The theme might be 'Dude, Where's My Candidate?' "

Given the unsettled nature of the race, given his recent surge in the polls, given the suspicion with which many conservatives view him -- given all of that, you might have thought that Giuliani would have viewed the CPAC event as an important marketing opportunity. You might have thought he'd have put some effort into his speech -- maybe, even, have written a new one.

Indeed, the crowd packed into the Omni Shoreham ballroom and gathered around the television monitors outside seemed to be waiting to be wowed. But Giuliani didn't so much seize the opportunity as amble through it. He neither tossed the crowd red meat (conservative judges, maybe?) nor took on his vulnerabilities (the closest he came was to quote Ronald Reagan, "My 80 percent ally is not my 20 percent enemy") nor offered them much in the way of substance.

"Americans want to sell you something," Giuliani told the crowd. "That's what we want to do. We want to sell you a product." If so, Giuliani is no Ron Popeil.

Instead, he served up a pedestrian address padded with Reagan references (15, by my count) and platitudes. "The most important lesson that I learned from Ronald Reagan was the importance of optimistic leadership. I believe Ronald Reagan was able to achieve the things he was able to achieve because Ronald Reagan was a leader, which is a combination of being a visionary and a practical person who can achieve results."

Or, "We're not a country of one ethnic group. . . . We're all different religions. And we're all different races. Since we're not identified that way, what identifies us as Americans? The thing that identifies us as American are our ideas. And our ideas are wonderful ideas. And they're ideas that the world is moving toward."

And that was in just the first five minutes. Read the whole thing for yourself, at http://www.cpac.org/speeches/Giuliani.doc, and decide if I'm being unfair.

Even when discussing the issue on which he has every reason to shine -- the war on terrorism -- Giuliani was unimpressive, spouting tired Reaganisms ("peace through strength") and arguing a proposition that no one except the straw Democrats of Republican imaginings seems to debate much: that America must "remain on offense" against terrorists.

"We need an American president that understands the necessity of being on offense; needs to explain it to the rest of the world," he said. "And then, finally, what we all need to do is to understand that America has the right ideas. We should not be embarrassed about ourselves. We shouldn't have our heads down."

About Iraq -- nothing, other than to lampoon congressional Democrats for pushing a nonbinding resolution ("I understand that next week they're going to debate the entire week to see if they can make the World Series a nonbinding result.")

As to Giuliani's competition, McCain skipped CPAC; Romney gave a much meatier and more rousing speech -- and he started by bringing up on stage "my sweetheart," his first and only wife. (Take that, Mr. Thrice Married-Once Annulled-Once Divorced-Mayor.)

In the end, one mediocre speech to one crowd 10 months before the first vote is cast will not matter much -- unless it presages more uninspired Giuliani performances.

Time magazine, in one of the more peculiar poll questions ever asked, reported this week that Giuliani is the candidate voters think would do best at speed-dating (16 percent, to Barack Obama's 13 percent).

The 2008 campaign, though, will be more like an overly prolonged engagement -- and it's far from clear whether voters will still want to date the mayor once the getting-to-know-you stage is over.

marcusr@washpost.com