Posts Tagged ‘ Three ’

“He’s due at 12.35,” one woman murmured to another in the plush, dimly lit lobby of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knights bridge yesterday lunchtime. “But he might be late. You know how these things go.” It was 12.32. Exactly three minutes later, Rudy Giuliani sprang from a black Jaguar and bounded up the hotel’s rear steps into an ornate dining room; three seconds after that, he was shaking hands with campaign donors.

Good time-management skills may not be the first quality Americans are looking for in their next president, but they certainly helped Mr Giuliani yesterday: in one 24-hour trip to London, he managed to wrap himself in the reputations of no fewer than four prime ministers – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, each of whom he met in the morning; Winston Churchill, whose granddaughter spoke at the fundraising lunch; and Margaret Thatcher, with whom the New York mayor appeared last night, before receiving a “medal of freedom” bearing her image.

Money, of course, was the most obvious explanation for the presence in Britain of the Republican front runner: tickets to the Mandarin Oriental lunch cost $1,000 each (£500), or $2,300 with the bonus of having your photo taken alongside Mr Giuliani. (American law sets an upper limit of $2,300 for individual donations at this stage in the race, and they can come only from US citizens.)

Crucial votes

But the closeness of the financial arms race between the candidates is only one of several factors conspiring to make the UK, for the first time, a genuine battleground in a US presidential election. Bill Clinton is due to hold an event for his wife, Hillary, in Windsor next month, two weeks before Michelle Obama does the same in London for her husband, Barack. The Republican Fred Thompson came earlier this year.

There are also the votes, which are becoming more important: there are an estimated 200,000 Americans living in the UK, out of around 6.6 million worldwide, and ballots from abroad are believed to have swung the result in the ultra-narrow 2006 Virginia Senate race, handing Congress to the Democrats.

And then there is the Thatcher factor. Mr Giuliani and Mrs Clinton have been fighting to claim the mantle of the former prime minister for themselves. In US politics, she has come to serve as a proxy for Ronald Reagan – and a useful reference-point for candidates desperate to distance themselves from George Bush and his foreign policies while retaining an aura of toughness.

Mrs Clinton’s campaign chairman made the link explicit, saying the former First Lady would campaign as the new Iron Lady (although, he conceded, “their policies are totally different”). “I don’t think Margaret Thatcher would impugn the integrity of a commanding general in a time of war, as Hillary Clinton did,” Mr Giuliani fired back.

“It’s been an embarrassment to be an American living in London over the last few years,” said Mimi Aye, an American businesswoman attending yesterday’s Giuliani lunch. “Even most of the staunch Republicans I know in London have a hard time defending Bush. But I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and Rudy is pro-choice, pro-gun control, and he’s appeared on national television wearing a dress.”

Along with his complex private life, however, these positions are not ones that the Rudy 2008 campaign has been keen to emphasize when campaigning in the US outside New York – a world that must sometimes seem, to the Brooklyn-born Mr Giuliani, far more foreign than London. He now says individual US states should make their own decisions on guns, and tomorrow he is due to address the National Rifle Association’s Celebration of American Values Conference in Washington.

Appearing alongside Churchill’s granddaughter Celia Sandys at lunch yesterday – she called him “Churchill in a baseball cap” – he focused instead on foreign policy, seeking to burnish his image as a hawk on Iran.

Delivering the inaugural Margaret Thatcher lecture for the US/UK think tank Atlantic Bridge last night, he called for an expansion of the US military, for Israel, Australia and India to join Nato and for a policy of “peace through strength,” because terrorism “feeds on weakness.”

In previous campaigns, abandoning the US campaign trail to fly to Europe to deliver a few remarks like that would hardly have been worth it. But “the whole question of cost-effectiveness [of overseas campaigning] has been dramatically rewritten, because the cost of campaigns is going up so high,” said Bob Bauer, a Democratic strategist, speaking to Congressional Quarterly.

Mr Obama has raised a record $58m in six months and Mrs Clinton $52m. Mr Giuliani has raised $35.6m – and, after yesterday’s meal at the Mandarin Oriental, a few crucial thousand more.