Airing tomorrow before 60 Minutes on all of Florida’s CBS affiliates. I’m sorry to say, I actually laughed at the part about Arafat, Castro, and the mafia. At this point he sounds less like Rudy than a guy doing a Rudy impersonation.

How’s he faring? The new polls are ugly but Rudy came prepared: Hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been cast, which means god knows how many votes were banked before McCain’s rise and Giuliani’s corresponding fall. Credit his campaign with foresight and a dogged GOTV effort. Karl at Protein Wisdom keeps hammering the importance of organization even while most of the media ignores it, notwithstanding the role it played in Hillary’s New Hampshire shocker. Read his take on Rudy. The smart line in the press today is that a Hillary loss in SC might be a Hillary win if it polarizes the campaign by race, but a Romney win in Florida that knocks Giuliani out could be a Romney loss on Super Tuesday since it clears the war for Maverick on Super Tuesday.

Meanwhile, with Fred out of the race, the media looks for a new target for its “lazy campaigner” meme. And finds one:

Presidential primaries are fought in two dimensions — across the vast reach of television, and in that intimate space as small as a man’s hand, or as tight as a burly hug. Opportunities for votes are seized, or squandered. For Giuliani, they have mainly been squandered. The former front-runner finds himself fighting for what most observers in Florida view as his survival…

In New Hampshire, where Giuliani led in the polls early and then collapsed by December, one of the former mayor’s appearances ended when aides asked attendees to remain in their seats so he could quickly leave the building and get to his next stop.

“I couldn’t figure out what he was doing,” said Andrew Smith, director of the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire, who was there. “Was there some kind of security consideration? Did he fear that some old Rotarian lady had a butter knife? That kind of thing really hurt him here.”…

[S]ome of the candidate’s friends lament that there hasn’t been enough of the feisty and freewheeling Giuliani during the race. A former adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still has dealings with the campaign, wistfully recalled the time that Giuliani took a sleepless 90-hour bus tour through New York’s five boroughs during his 1997 mayoral reelection campaign. “He talked to people, took hard questions, didn’t mind controversy, and said what was on his mind,” the old friend said. “He was kind of magic when he just let it go; he connected. He didn’t do that kind of thing a lot, but when he did, it paid off. He’s been so careful in this campaign.”

If Huck goes bust and Rudy does well, Mittheads are sitting pretty on Wednesday morning. Which is exactly what the Clintons want…

Link: sevenload.com