NEW YORK — Rudolph W. Giuliani's first inauguration as mayor here was a family affair. His 7-year-old son, Andrew, mugged for the cameras as Papa Rudy toasted his television hostess wife, Donna, as "my partner, my inspiration and my lover." Then daughter Caroline, 4, hid behind her hat as the couple kissed that Jan. 2, 1994.
Thirteen years later, that familial unit is nowhere to be seen in the Giuliani presidential campaign. The once rambunctious Andrew, now a burly Duke sophomore, has indicated that he has no plans to stump for his father -- he's too busy working on his golf game. Neither he nor Caroline, now poised to enter Harvard, are even mentioned on the campaign's website, JoinRudy2008.com.
And the woman shown now with Giuliani is not their mother, but wife No. 3, nurse-by-training Judith Nathan Giuliani, who recently volunteered to New York tabloids that this was her third marriage as well.
"I don't think any of us have perfect lives," Giuliani himself said soon after, when both faced TV's Barbara Walters.
"Judge me by my public performance," he added.
Supporters of Giuliani, the GOP front-runner in polls, are counting on voters to do just that during a campaign that may test whether the electorate really cares any longer, in the post-Clinton era, about a candidate's personal life.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a chief rival for the party nomination, has been through his own unflattering divorce. Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who is being urged to run, had a divorce, then a vigorous single life -- and now has a much younger wife. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who may throw his hat in, was having an extramarital affair with a congressional aide -- now his third wife -- while he was lambasting President Clinton during the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.
Of course, that infamous time also shadows Democratic poll-leader Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who still must endure the leering monologue jokes about her husband.
But the spotlight on private histories has shined brightest on the Republican side since February, when TheSmoking Gun.com posted excerpts from a "vulnerability study" commissioned by Giuliani's 1993 mayoral campaign, which warned of perceptions of a "weirdness factor" due to his first marriage, to his second cousin. And that was written before the disintegration of Giuliani's second marriage, which saw him inform wife Donna Hanover via news conference of his intent to split, and which spawned such headlines as "Donna Makes the Creep Pay."
Even before negative campaigning begins in earnest, other candidates have found ways to rattle the domestic skeletons. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has trumpeted his 38-year marriage; and longshot Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, has argued that at least one group must judge candidates by personal conduct.
"It would be a complete loss of credibility," Huckabee said, "for Christian evangelical leaders to suddenly say, 'With Republicans, we're going to have a new set of rules. It applied to Bill Clinton, but won't apply to anyone else.' "
The pre-Clinton era
For nearly 200 years, even one failed marriage was considered a death knell for would-be presidents. Candidates were expected to lead sensible lives with stay-at-home wives and stable families, or at least project that image.
Stuart Spencer recalls the 1964 presidential campaign he ran for New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who divorced messily in 1962 and married a former staffer in 1963.
For months, the campaign kept the focus on Rockefeller's rival for the Republican nomination, Barry Goldwater, and whether it was safe to put Goldwater "near the button" in the nuclear age.
Then Rockefeller's new wife, Happy, gave birth, an event that normally would boost a candidacy -- except in this case, Spencer recalled, Goldwater ran ads featuring his wife of 30 years and four children, which "said everything that had to be said: this nice family against this womanizer."
In 1980, Spencer helped Ronald Reagan win election as the first divorced president. Reagan's 1948 split from actress Jane Wyman was old news by then, and he'd been remarried for 28 years. Even so, the campaign worried "his ex-spouse could go public with some hairy tales," Spencer said.
"It's a lot different now," he added. "I don't think we have a lot of old-fashioned families left."
Benjamin Ginsberg, director of the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University, thinks that Giuliani, for one, could not have been a contender a decade ago.
Giuliani and the other Republicans have the last Democratic president to thank, Ginsberg says, for the fact that even infidelities in office today are "not disqualifying."
"We're in the post-Clinton era. People have become more tolerant of personal foibles," he said. "The only way a candidate can be really hurt by revelations now is to deny. Then they get killed by the lies and deceptions."
