“Ahhh! Human contact! It burns, it burns!”Photo: Getty Images
Who’s on top in the current slapfest between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, wherein both candidates lustily highlight each other’s flip-flopping? Slate thinks “Romney is unlikely to win this tit-for-tat” because Rudy’s got YouTube on his side — there’s a lot of fairly recent sound bites of the former Massachusetts governor saying somewhat liberal stuff out there. On the other hand, it’s not like Rudy hasn’t got a formerly stellar gay-rights record just waiting to be fashioned into a Sodom-and-Gomorrah attack ad. In the meantime, both have discovered a perfect smear tactic: link the opponent to Hillary! Yesterday, Romney reached back to 1994 to remind voters that Giuliani “had nothing but praise” for Clinton’s ill-fated health-care-reform plan. Which is, well, true. Funny thing, though, Giuliani himself recently accused Romney of “sort of [doing] Hillary’s plan in Massachusetts.” Following the whole interaction is, frankly, not unlike watching two kids kick a dead squirrel back and forth: Both keep yelling “ew,” but nobody’s man enough to stop, even though the squirrel is going to be kicked right back. One irony here is that both Mitt and Rudy are correct: Both used to be far less ideologically rigid when it came to concrete governance issues, hence the now-damaging quotes. Another irony is that their spat is reframing the Republican primary race as a two-way contest — leaving behind a handful of actual lifelong conservatives. In the end, the only one left undiminished is the squirrel. —Michael Idov
