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."
