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Mr. Home-Wrecker Goes to WashingtonWhy shouldn't we judge Rudy Giuliani by his disastrous home life?

By Emily BazelonPosted Tuesday, May 8, 2007, at 2:55 PM ET

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In other words, Giuliani isn't a dad trying to do right by his kids who just happens to be twice-divorced. He's a father who burned his ex-wife to such a degree that his son hasn't forgiven him six years later or made peace with his father's new wife. Giuliani's line to voters about this mess is the classic "Judge me by my public performance." Cue a condescending lecture about American prudishness: If only we could be blasé and sophisticated like the Europeans, we'd figure out that a candidate's personal foibles are no basis for deciding whether he or she will make an effective government leader.

But what exactly has this nonchalance gotten the Continent lately? This month, photographs of 70-year-old former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dandling young women on his knee appeared under the newspaper headline "Berlusconi's Harem." In February, when Berlusconi's wife published a letter scolding her husband for embarrassing her with his incorrigible flirting when he was in, as well as out of, office, one Italian editor celebrated this "explosion of strange and weird vitality," saying, ''People miss very much that style. It's not healthy, but it's Italian." Maybe. But Berlusconi left his country saddled with debt and a sluggish economy after it spent five years enthralled to his cult of personality.

A past like Giuliani's betrays a level of self-indulgence that, if nothing else, suggests that more fireworks are in store and that the show will be long-running. We'll all be strapped into front-row seats. Giuliani's psychodramas may or may not tell us about the sort of leader he'll be, but we've already been forced to think enough about the sort of man he is. (The prospect of President Hillary Clinton and four more years of her marriage leaves me with a similar sense of dread.) All elections are trade-offs. But when a candidate starts off with a loutish and loathsome past, chances are good that his time in office will be marked by missteps and distraction and that he'll be more irritating and less effective as a result. I'm with Andrew, who said he was too busy training to be a professional golfer to support his father's candidacy: We've all got better things to do.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX.
Photograph of the Giulianis by Matthew Peyton/Getty Images.
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