Giuliani's In, Democrats Scared

Rudy made it official and the donks are spinning. Check this out:

HILLARY AND RUDY....I'm with Atrios on this: I don't think it's surprising at all that Hillary Clinton trounced Rudy Giuliani in a recent poll in New York state. It's sort of the flipside of my earlier argument about Hillary being stronger than many
people think.

In Hillary's case, my argument is that there are a lot of people who have vague, negative impressions of her from the 90s, and that these people are going to be pleasantly surprised when they see her for the first time in years and she turns out not to be a fire-breathing dragon after all. Maybe it's the soft bigotry of low expectations, but it's real nonetheless. She has nowhere to go but up.

Giuliani is just the opposite. The average voter has vague, positive impressions of Rudy thanks to his 9/11 heroics, and these people are going to be unpleasantly surprised when they see him for the first time in years and he turns out to be nastier than they remember (not to mention being freighted down by a closet full of skeletons they didn't know about). He has nowhere to go but down.

Uh, wrong Kevin. The public will not be "pleasantly surprised." They remember a shrill Hillary and she's still a shrill Hillary. She may win the nomination on pure money alone, but she'll never win the Presidency over Giuliani. Rudy would have beaten her in 2000 if he didn't drop out because of prostate cancer. Instead, she faced a horrible candidate in Rick Lazio.

People do have a very positive impression of Rudy because he earned it. He was on the front lines and managed an unmanageable situation with brilliance. You can't take that away from the man no matter how hard you try. Public perception is everything and the different public perceptions of the two is striking.