Quote:(We really should work out what got perturbed that he ended up running and winning; and was he up against Obama or Clinton?)
Hoy. Just in time for the end of silly season, wot?
This is really, really rough & I don't intend to do a full play-by-play, but here goes:
The 2008 election season is a referendum on handwavium. Of the serious candidates, the breakdown goes something like this:
Obama's the strongest pro-wave candidate (which is to say, he's cautiously optimistic about the stuff, like Rudd in Australia). Clinton, Edwards, McCain & Romney are more conservative about the study and use of handwavium, but not to the point of being reactionary. Huckabee.. I have trouble getting a read on; I can see him going on a Jesus-fueled reactionary tear, or I can see him trying to use it as a populist lever. Depends on which way the wind blows. Giuliani is of course the most reactionary of the lot.
(Of all the candidates, the Ronpaul is the most enthusiastically pro-wave, but he was not and never will be a "serious" candidate. Also, his native constitutency - loudmouthed fanboys on the Internet - will most likely have already fucked off to Fenspace en masse and left his campaign looking like even *more* of a joke than the OTL one was.)
People are scared, so pro-wave stances are off the table immediately. Giuliani's dynamic "standing on the wreckage" campaigning makes him look like more of a Leader than the more measured campaigns of his opponents. Fueled by fear and flashy fen moments like Wave Convoy's departure, Ptichka's escape from Wisconsin, the Professor's European adventure etc. Giuliani manages to ride that into a narrow win over Clinton.
Four years later, post-Kandor, mid-ANZAC Renaissance, Giuliani's uniquely inept management of the USA - even by the standards of the Previous Administration - have enough people fed up with him that even the Stingray and Grover's Corners incidents can't save his ass. Rudy gets LBJ'd by his own party, and in the end his nonentity of a veep gets smoked by the opposition in the general (I'm thinking Obama/Schweitzer here, but YMMV).
So that's the Rudy Years in a nutshell; fear, posturing and Epic Failure. What the future holds, I'm not gonna say. Or at least not right now. I've been kinda kicking around a 2020 GOP primary where Sarah Palin and Chris Marsden go for each other's throats, because that to me would be fucking hilarious. Again, YMMV.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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