Will Rudy Shine?

By Michael Scherer

Rudy Giuliani has been running for President in a blur--literally. He needs his eyeglasses to see distance, but at most events he won't wear them. Instead, he rattles through his stump speech--tax cuts increase revenue, beware of Hillary Clinton, remember 9/11--while gazing into a fuzzy void. The spectacles come on only briefly, during question time, so he can make eye contact with his inquisitors.

This is ironic because Giuliani has run the most strategically farsighted campaign in the Republican field. When he came in fifth in Iowa, he hardly flinched. "We put our emphasis on other places," he said. When a Southern pastor, Mike Huckabee, beat him in New Hampshire, Giuliani was upbeat. "This is just the beginning," he chirped. When the libertarian scold Ron Paul cleaned his clock in South Carolina, the former New York mayor acted as if victory would soon be upon him. "I'm an optimist," he announced.

In the face of an unending stream of bad news, the onetime front runner has kept his sights fixed firmly on the Jan. 29 primary in Florida. That's where he plans to finally score a win and rack up 57 delegates in the state's winner-take-all contest.

With rare exceptions, the media railbirds and political pros roll their eyes. Even "America's mayor," they reason, cannot bypass a month of electoral fever with some early bird-dinner glad-handing. "We recognized, by doing this unconventional approach, there would be a good deal of criticism," says Mike DuHaime, Giuliani's campaign manager. "But we have used our time well."

By that he means that for months the Giuliani campaign has been banking on a little-noticed advantage it has built among the orange groves and shuffleboard courts--a grass-roots army of over 6,000 volunteers who have been making more than a million phone calls to get Giuliani supporters to vote early. If historical trends hold, roughly one-third of the Republican votes in Florida will be cast before Election Day, either by absentee ballot or by "early voting" at polling places set up across the state.

Ed Pozzouli, who chairs the Giuliani campaign in Broward County, gives an example of how the mayor has gamed the system. On the day of the Nevada caucus and the South Carolina primary, when his GOP rivals were occupied elsewhere, Giuliani arrived in Coral Springs for a rally that took place a required 100 ft. (about 30 m) away from a library where early-voting machines were set up. "The mayor spoke," Pozzouli said. "And then he said, 'O.K., let's go vote.'" More than 100 attendees walked to the library and cast their ballots. Two days earlier in Pensacola, the number of daily early voters nearly doubled after Giuliani visited the area and his volunteers bombarded homes with phone calls, locking in support that will not waiver with the news cycles to come.

The only GOP candidate with a comparable ground operation in Florida is Mitt Romney, who also boasts campaign offices and thousands of volunteers across the state. The smaller-dollar campaigns of Mike Huckabee and John McCain are only just now beginning to fly in staff and open offices. If the race remains close, experts say, the early-voting push mastered by Giuliani could prove decisive. "If you have a good organization and you have a multicandidate field," says political scientist Darryl Paulson of the University of South Florida, "it could clearly be the margin of difference in the campaign."

But Giuliani has to stay near the top for his gambit to succeed. Until now, his long-range vision has been unable to make up for his inability to connect with the voters right in front of him. And his lackluster campaign performance appears to be taking its toll in the 21 states that will select Republican delegates on Feb. 5, the day that may very well decide the GOP nominee. After months of leading the field, Giuliani is in a tight race for first in Florida and trails McCain by double digits in national polls. January surveys have repeatedly shown Giuliani trailing in his home state of New York.

Giuliani advisers will tell you these past few weeks are nothing more than the darkest hours before a Florida dawn. But they, like everyone else, still don't know whether GOP voters will rally around a candidate who chose to sit out the first four weeks of the campaign.