Giuliani's Florida Gamble
Aides Forgo Salaries Amid Waiting Game

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 12, 2008

For more than a month, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has been in self-imposed political exile, a virtual sideshow as he all but sat out the early primaries to wait for the 2008 presidential contest to arrive in Florida.

Now, being irrelevant appears to be taking a toll. Yesterday, Giuliani's campaign revealed that top aides are working without pay to save money, an indication that donors are growing restless as they watch the candidate finish repeatedly near the bottom of the GOP pack.

Campaign aides say that the money is still flowing in and that $7 million is on hand. But concerns have surfaced that donors may not be interested in throwing good money after bad. "Are they nervous? Sure," said one Washington donor close to the Giuliani campaign.

But the donor added: "Chaos is our friend. And right now, the Republican side is chaotic. The other candidates are in a circular firing squad."

Still, Giuliani is under increasing pressure to make sure he does not lose in Florida. He has stepped up his television advertising, beginning two new spots Thursday. He has proposed what his team calls the "largest tax cut in history." On Sunday, he will begin a three-day bus tour across Florida, complete with four or five appearances daily, a pace unheard of for the candidate in previous months.

"The field is still wide open, which is what we wanted," said campaign manager Michael DuHaime, the man behind what the team calls its "late-state" strategy to win the Republican nomination. "You want to avoid a whole lot of momentum for one candidate. The further we get into the calendar, the better it is for us."

DuHaime confirmed that he and more than a dozen other top advisers and consultants with large salaries stopped being paid as of Jan. 1. "It's about making sure that as much money as we can have, we have," he said in an interview.

But he said that most of the other campaign workers are still being paid and that the operation is financially healthy. "Most of our donors are people who believe in the candidate and believe in Rudy," he said. "This was a calculated strategy, understanding that this would be a time that other candidates would be in the news."

The past few days have been typical.

Yesterday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee rallied with several hundred people in the small Michigan town of Birch Run, immediately returning to populist themes after a speech to business leaders in Detroit. Huckabee raised $1 million in the days after winning the Iowa primary and has set a goal of bringing in $10 million by Feb. 5 -- as much in the next month as he collected in almost all of 2007 -- from 40,000 donors.

Former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.) grabbed the spotlight Thursday night with a harsh attack on Huckabee's conservative credentials.

Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, barnstormed Michigan yesterday and released another ad in the state, in which he pledges to "work every day to change Washington and bring us back, because Michigan is personal to me."

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) began running a new radio ad in Michigan featuring a man who was a prisoner of war with him in Vietnam.

By contrast, Giuliani is letting the presidential campaign come to him, a strategy that has never been tried before and that is fraught with risks. Advisers hope he will win the Sunshine State's Jan. 29 primary and vault himself back into White House contention before 22 states hold primary contests a week later.

New York and New Jersey will vote that day, as will several other big states such as California that Giuliani believes he can win. If all goes according to plan, he will have amassed a significant lead in the hunt for delegates by the end of Feb. 5.

But Giuliani has been in a downward spiral from the first-place position he held for months in national polls. In the most recent CNN-Opinion Research survey, he had the support of 18 percent of likely Republican voters, in third place behind Huckabee, at 21 percent, and McCain, at 34 percent.

Despite those numbers, if there is a year that Giuliani's approach could work, it may be this one, when none of his rivals are running the table. Once dominant in Iowa and New Hampshire, Romney is fighting for his political life. McCain, Huckabee and Thompson are battling in South Carolina, a contest that could be fatal to Thompson's hopes and highly damaging to Huckabee's.

Giuliani is spending about $700,000 a week on television commercials in Florida, and is the only Republican candidate on the air in the state since Romney decided to shift his focus to Michigan and do battle there with McCain. In his most recent ad, Giuliani practically pleads with the state's voters to ignore the media coverage of his rivals while they wait.

"With pundits and politicos handicapping the campaign like the Super Bowl, it's easy to lose sight of what's at stake," the announcer says. "An economy in peril. A country at war. A future uncertain. The media loves process. Talking heads love chatter. But Florida has a chance to turn down the noise and show the world that leadership is what really matters."

Other campaigns are beginning to notice Giuliani's increased activity in the state. In a memo to supporters yesterday, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis announced the creation of a Florida Victory Fund and said, "We're working hard to build support in Florida."

If Republicans in Florida ignore the past month of wall-to-wall coverage of his challengers, Giuliani could turn a win there into momentum that vaults him back to the front of the pack, where he was for much of 2007.

But first, he has to wait.

"Early on in the campaign, when you saw the possibility that only one person was going to take all the early primaries, I thought it looked like a very stupid strategy," said Brett Doster, a Republican consultant in Florida who is not working for any of the candidates. "He was in a position of standing back and letting this wave of momentum wash over him."

Now, though, Doster said he is having second thoughts.

"With the dice-and-slice situation, where it looks like you have multiple candidates winning different states, it looks like it might turn out to be a smart strategy," he said.

Other observers are not so sure.

One GOP consultant who is familiar with Giuliani's strategic planning said the decision to wait until Florida looks like "a brilliant one." But he said the campaign has not made the most of the time it has been out of the news.

He noted that the team received very little media coverage of its tax-cutting plan this week. And he said aides have not used the down time to develop a clear, consistent message that communicates what Giuliani's campaign is all about.

"If he can win Florida, it's a new day," said the consultant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank about the campaign.

"The problem is, this campaign for some time has been running on luck rather than skill. At some point, the luck runs out."

Staff writers Matthew Mosk and Perry Bacon Jr. contributed to this report.