What to call, if we were to define them, Rudy Giuliani's manner and bearing? Yesterday, National Review's John Derbyshire tendered a neologism, "SOBness." Amusement aside, the lexicon can in fact supply a word, one that I found some time ago but kept from speech and writing because it is used by no one and, appearing slightly antique, defensibly so. The word is "hardihood." It denotes, says Merriam-Webster, "a resolute and self-assured audacity [or disregard for prudence or convention] carried to the point of insolent impudence [or boldness that, intentionally or not, offends]."
Giuliani, a man of hardihood? He was a prosecutor among whose noted quarry were mobsters; as a mayor of the city with deeper foundations than the site of two seminal American documents and the current seat of the federal government, promulgator of change where thought to be intractable. Crime and poverty in New York City fell under his municipal tenure, and if Giuliani was responsible, his managerial idiom — confrontation, repudiation, etioliation of standing political interests — must be credited.
The question can be answered by inference, too. Leftists regard Republicans who are affable as half-witted, and Republicans who are assertive as autocrats — so if the habitual response to George Bush or Ronald Reagan is "dumb," Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani have drawn out, respectively, Time magazine's 1994 cover beholding "the politics of anger," and this one documentary portraying the former New York mayor as a tyrant.
A greater demand for scrutiny of what was said by the yet-exploratory presidential candidate in public or private has produced stories from rightists, now. However aspersive, unless all of them are false it is unlikely that, personally, Mr. Giuliani is a very nice man. For probity, he has marital infidelity and acrimony in a past that might well be attributed to callousness.
Rudy Giuliani, if he runs, will not try for the papacy; and though primary caucuses may not admit an adulterer, the Oval Office has never been the professional residence of naifs. Pertinent, then, is if Republicans want a candidate who is, among other qualifications, more fluent and consistent with the foreign missions of the sitting president than the sitting president, who can seem pretty dispirited these days — and if the balance of an electoral majority will vote for hardihood.