Rudy Giuliani

This isn’t the time to bash President Bush. To be fair, he has responsibilities far more crushing than rescuing trapped survivors and preventing despair and panic in New York; he must lead the effort to find those responsible for this brutally efficient strike against the U.S. and decide how to retaliate. Maybe there wasn’t a minute for Bush to visit a rescue site or a hospital, or to hold a press conference and air the range of questions and worries we all had, on that very first day of chaos.

But for the moment, at least, Bush missed a crucial opportunity to show he’s ready for a role that has, since the 2000 campaign, just seemed too big for him: being a leader who can reassure and rally Americans, with his self-confidence that he knows exactly what’s needed and that he can provide it, and with his unswerving connection to his own feelings and values — in this case, grief and anger and a determination to prevail, side by side. That role can still be filled by the president; this is going to be a very long week, with lots of need for reassurance and rallying. But if Bush aspires to it, he should look at what Giuliani’s done in the last two days.

I’m no Giuliani fan — I think I’ve liked him less than Bush, until now — but he’s done a stunning job healing the city, and the nation, in the wake of this awful terror. It might be the combination of his own recent personal suffering — prostate cancer, an ugly divorce — and putting his political career on hold, but he’s risen to the occasion with a warmth and humanity I never would have anticipated.

I’m not alone. In New York and all across the country liberals are wondering if this attack has unhinged us. Could this stirring in our hearts, this admiration, this gratitude, really be for Rudy Giuliani — he of the crackdowns on “indecent art” and street vendors and civil liberties; he of the race-baiting, the nastiness, the arrogance? But of course, we’re not seeing that Rudy Giuliani. We’re seeing the cancer survivor and sad, screw-up husband, the father, and maybe most important of all, the man who lost dozens of his own friends in the police and fire departments in yesterday’s nightmare.

His emotional tone has been just right. “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately,” he told CNN early Tuesday, with moving honesty. Later, in an afternoon press conference, his voice broke, briefly, when he described seeing the World Trade Center after the attack: “I don’t know that I’m really able to describe it. It was the most horrific scene I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” He was trapped in an adjacent building when one of the towers fell on top of it, he noted. A reporter asked, were you scared for your own safety? “Sure, yes,” he said matter-of-factly.

“He’s had perfect pitch,” says writer John Leonard, a longtime Giuliani critic who has nonetheless been moved by the mayor’s leadership during the crisis. “I was extremely impressed. There’s a lot of personal pain there, because he knew a bunch of the cops and firemen.”

I’ve thought about that — Giuliani’s obvious pain on Tuesday — a lot. I liked it when he got choked up, recounting the horror he saw. We don’t want that in every leader, of course: I didn’t want Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, to get teary on Tuesday. (I also didn’t want Rumsfeld to seem completely nuts on Wednesday, railing against people who leak classified documents, apropos of nothing, but I don’t always get what I want.) But in times like these we need to feel some sympathetic vibration from our leaders or they seem inert. As Leonard puts it, “He’s like a tuning fork for us. You need somebody up there reflecting back your pain.”

“And there’s been absolutely no political rhetoric,” Leonard adds. Amazingly, the normally macho Giuliani has resisted demagoguery and saber-rattling: He refused to call the attack an “act of war,” insisting, “I think the president is the one that has to respond.” And on Wednesday he went out of his way to warn against anti-Arab attacks, of which there had been only a few, he said.

By comparison, Leonard noted sadly (and yes, even liberals are saddened by this), “The president is nowhere.”

Let’s give Bush the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge he’s extraordinarily busy. What is most disturbing about his first two days of handling the crisis is his failure to hold a single press conference. Question-and-answer sessions help reassure Americans their leader knows what he’s doing and is on top of a situation — which, sadly, may be why he hasn’t had one. More subtly and psychologically, though, they’re a kind of dialogue: The leader stands and listens to the concerns that surface, from trivial to crucial, and engages with them, holding a kind of conversation with the nation. Admittedly, rude reporters aren’t always the best stand-ins for the American public, but Bush hasn’t sought out a venue for a question-and-answer session with citizens, either. Of course, at a time like this we can’t help but miss President Clinton, who was smart enough to project genuine mastery of virtually any crisis, and empathic enough to reassure us he understood our worry and pain and would deal with that, too.

I try to check myself before going into full swoon over Giuliani. You can see how decades of crisis could lead to fascism; at a time like this I worry I’m entirely too ready to fall into the arms of a strong man. And in some ways he’s the same old Rudy, only lovable now, because his affinity for authoritarianism, his capacity to turn every challenge into Armageddon, was ridiculous when applied to graffiti artists and street vendors, but is exactly appropriate here.

But the attraction to strength and security is normal. Anyone who had to tell their children what happened to New York and Washington Tuesday morning; who had to watch that plane tear through that building, whether in person or on TV; who saw the mother on CNN recounting her son’s last “I love you” on his cellphone from his doomed plane; anyone who had to get up this morning, had to cross bridges or tunnels, climb the stairs down to the subway, ride an elevator; anyone, everyone, has a powerful need for reassurance right now, and a desire for protection — protection from despair and nihilism, from terrorized paralysis, from hate and dark fantasies of doomed revenge. Giuliani has provided that reassurance and protection, and the nation is grateful to him.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”

You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.

Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.

Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!

I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.

Among Regan’s many charges against her old employer was the claim that a top News Corp. executive told her to lie to federal investigators about her affair with Kerik, when he was (unbelievably) being vetted to head Bush’s Department of Homeland Security in 2004. (He dropped his bid when legal troubles came to light, and he’s currently in prison for tax fraud.) The exec told her to lie, Regan said, to protect Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and a close friend of Roger Ailes. Fox-haters speculated the “high executive” was Ailes himself, given the fawning coverage the former New York mayor got from Fox, but Regan settled the lawsuit for a cool $10.7 million payment from News Corp., and the matter seemed to end there.

Today the New York Times reveals that it was in fact Ailes who told Regan to lie about Kerik – and the paper says Regan had tape recordings to prove it. Fox isn’t even bothering to deny it; where in 2007 a News Corp. spokeswoman told the paper “the company saw no merit in the filing,” Wednesday a spokeswoman said only that News Corp. had a letter from Regan “stating that Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence her with respect to a government investigation,” adding, “The matter is closed.” (News Corp. officially retracted its claim that Regan was anti-Semitic as part of its settlement.) Regan’s lawyer insists News Corp. is misrepresenting Regan’s official statement, but he declined to say more.

He doesn’t need to say more: Affidavits reviewed by the Times show Regan’s former lawyers discussing “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.” The lawyer also said, “The Ailes matter became a focal point of our work” in preparing Regan’s case against her former employer. Key to Regan’s case was her claim she had been smeared with charges of anti-Semitism to preemptively discredit her in case she ever said anything about Kerik that could hurt Giuliani. “Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,” he wrote.

You’ll recall that, in fact, back when Giuliani still seemed a viable presidential candidate, Kerik was a serious blemish on his record. Giuliani was regularly grilled not only about whether and when he knew about his former police commissioner’s many personal and legal troubles, but also about why he would recommend the man for a cabinet post. (The Bush administration was not amused.) Days before Regan dropped her legal bombshell, the Times revealed that Giuliani had in fact been briefed about Kerik’s ethics troubles by the city’s investigations commissioner before Giuliani appointed him to lead the police department in 2000.

After the Times story, the GOP candidate blithely told the Associated Press: “There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime … What Bernie Kerik did wrong did not implicate what the results were for the public.”

Classic Giuliani: Arrogant and stubborn. Now we have classic Roger Ailes: using his media power to protect a Republican political friend. Giuliani officiated at Ailes’ last wedding, and helped when Fox couldn’t get a New York cable channel. The man who started out as an aide to Richard Nixon has never left behind his party politics, despite his claims of being “fair and balanced.” We’ll see if Fox reports on the Times story.

Fittingly, the whole mess came to light because Regan’s former lawyers are now suing Regan herself, claiming she fired them on the eve of her settlement with News Corp. to cut them out of their contingency fee. The affidavits the Times reviewed were mistakenly left public; they have since been removed from the public case file. What a tangled web.

Judith Regan was last seen on the Bravo television hit “Millionaire Matchmaker,” which sets up lonelyhearts moneybags with appropriate partners. (Her TV date went well; no affidavits have come to light revealing whether she found true love.)

Bernie Kerik was last seen on Twitter, railing against the so-called ground zero mosque — from prison. It all makes sense: Fox helped gin up the mosque non-story; Park51 is only blocks from the apartment for 9/11 rescuers that Kerik used as a love nest during his affair with Regan, which Ailes wanted Regan to lie about.

And Rudy Giuliani? His presidential bid imploded in 2008, he had to fold his consulting firm last year, but the New York Post claimed last month that he’s looking at a 2012 presidential bid. The Post is, of course, owned by News Corp.