Politics Has Lost Its Charm

The first political campaign on which I ever worked was a provincial election in the west end of Toronto, more than three decades ago. We won, little thanks to me. (And since the candidate was a New Democrat, no thanks are due.)

It was a small operation: a half dozen volunteers, some pamphlet literature, lawn signs, door knocking. We had no polls, no consultants, no radio or television commercials, none of the technology of modern electioneering.

The campaign office on Roncesvalles Avenue was choked with the smell of cigarettes and bad takeaway food. The desks were topped with half-empty styrofoam coffee cups, butts stubbed out in the milky residue. To this day, the smell of coffee-soaked cigarette butts is to me the smell of politics.

There are of course no butts at the headquarters of the Rudy Giuliani campaign in lower Manhattan: Mayor Bloomberg's ban on cigarettes in all interior places has seen to that. The Giuliani campaign spends more in an hour than that campaign in 1974 spent in total -- and that's before winning the nomination. BlackBerrys, video conferencing and the 24-hour news cycle have transformed politics.

For me too, something more personal has changed. For most of my life, politics was for me half-cause, half-sport. The sheer game of it fascinated me: The assemblage of coalitions, the testing of themes, the black art of the negative campaign ad. When I was invited to write speeches for George W. Bush in December, 2000, I accepted not because I was so enthusiastic about the new president --I'd preferred John McCain during the primaries --but largely out of curiosity.

Since 9/11, though, the game has lost it charm. Politics has taken on a new, deadly seriousness. And I've found myself engaged with a new level of intensity. Last month I signed on as a foreign policy advisor to the Rudy Giuliani campaign.

I've been struggling a little how to fuse that role with my role as a commentator in this paper and at National Review Online. The short answer is to mention it anytime I write on a subject where my affiliations and loyalties seem relevant: In journalism as in politics, disclosure solves most problems. I should mention too that I am working without pay.

There's a longer answer, though, and it involves some deeper feelings about what I am doing in this paper and on the campaign.

The core work of the Giuliani foreign policy advisors is to thrash out a coherent new foreign policy for the post-Bush era. That's the same work I do in most of my other hours of the week: on this page, in other media and in the book I've just finished after three years work. We try to analyze problems and propose solutions.

But analysis and understanding are nothing without the ability to execute them effectively.

In the days when George Bush was more popular, many commentators compared him to Harry Truman: the fiery, argumentative president in place at the beginning of the Cold War. That was meant as a compliment, but it should be remembered that Truman ended his administration with the lowest popularity ratings in the history of the modern presidency. Truman suffered for many of the same reasons Bush is suffering now: the United States was mired in a protracted and inconclusive war (Korea then, Iraq now). Frustrated, Americans turned in 1952 to a leader who could get things done: Ike Eisenhower, the man who had presided over the single greatest public triumph of his time, the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Rudy Giuliani has proven himself the most successful public-sector executive of our time. In 1993, the year before he took office in New York, the city suffered 1,995 homicides. In 2001, his last year, the city suffered only 626, apart of course from the 9/11 terror attacks.

Giuliani was not riding a nationwide trend: Crime rates in New York descended radically more steeply than anywhere else. New York City is home to only about 2.5% of all Americans. Yet New York accounted for 15% of all the reductions in murder in the United States in the 1990s.

Of all the candidates running for president, Giuliani is the only one who can say: I accepted a public problem thought to be unsolveable -- and solved it. Then it was crime; now it is terrorism, war and the many domestic problems of the United States besides.

Others will have different points of view, and the struggle for the Republican nomination will be a hard fought one. I have no certainty about how that struggle will end. I do have one certainty though: That I owed readers of this paper an explanation of what I am doing, and why, so that they can read this column --as they should read any column--in the full knowledge of the writer's loyalties and commitments.