Giuliani’s ‘swift boaters’

WASHINGTON - If there was one lesson of the 2004 election cycle, it was respond to attacks quickly and directly. In the summer of 2004, John Kerry let a slowly building media campaign against his Vietnam War experience explode into a debacle. From that campaign a new phrase entered the political lexicon: “swift boating.” Now it appears that Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani may have his own “swift boaters.”

Now the International Association of Fire Fighters, the union for professional firefighters with a long history of support for Democratic candidates, is getting into the act with a 13-minute video that is essentially a long attack ad against Giuliani’s support for firefighters when he was mayor of New York. It is buttressed by a comprehensive Web site titled “ Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend.”

Both the video and the Web site were unveiled Wednesday. Simultaneously, the video is being uplinked to YouTube and at least a handful of other Internet video sites like video.google.com.

Campaigning on tragedy
Many firefighters are incensed by Giuliani’s use of 9/11 in his presidential campaign, and they are determined to pierce what they call the “myth of Giuliani,” said Harold Schaitberger, international president of the union.

Schaitberger said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that union members were offended that Giuliani, who was mayor during the Sept. 11 attacks, is using the tragedy to raise money and create a theme for his presidential campaign, and they claim that he is distorting the truth to do it.

“He’s out and around the country ... trying to sign up our members so he can use them as a backdrop,” Schaitberger said.

The video uses testimonials from a half-dozen firefighters and relatives of firefighters who died in the World Trade Center attack. And while the arguments aren’t completely new, when coupled with the images of rescue workers at the World Trade Center site, the video is powerfully effective and potentially damaging to the Giuliani campaign.

Giuliani criticizes attack as partisan
The Giuliani campaign issued statements pointing to the IAFF’s history of endorsing Democratic candidates and noting Schaitberger’s affiliation with the 2004 Kerry campaign and the Democratic Leadership Council. It quoted a retired New York firefighter saying “firefighters know the difference between politics and leadership.”

And it released a statement from Howard Safir, Giuliani’s fire commissioner and then police commissioner in New York, praising the former mayor’s support for firefighters on and after 9/11. “Firefighters across the country have no greater friend than Rudy Giuliani,” Safir said.

But Schaitberger said the campaign against Giuliani was not driven by politics.

“It’s not about a Republican candidate,” he insisted. “It’s about a candidate trying to build his candidacy on a legend of 9/11.”

Schaitberger acknowledged that with 281,000 members, “our union is politically diversified — it’s a cross-section of our country.” But he maintained that he and the union’s leadership “do speak for our members, and the fact is that our members are more than concerned about the treatment of those who were lost on that day.”

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