Giuliani tells Laconia audience he's only candidate who knows how to run things

The man most national polls are showing to be the current frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination — former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — campaigned for the first time in Belknap County last evening, charming an audience of 100 or so people who went to The Margate hotel on relatively short notice to hear him speak.

Giuliani spoke for about 15 minutes and then answered questions for another half hour before departing. Very unusually for a politician, he entered the room exactly on time and left on cue. Perhaps he was trying to emphasize a point he made when answering a question about why he should be considered the most qualified to hold the nation's highest office of all the candidates running in the New Hampshire Primary.

"I know how to run things," Giuliani said, in noting that the experience he gained managing one of the world's largest economies for two terms — he was NYC mayor from 1994-2001 — gave him the executive experience no other candidate can match, and taught him how to work a give-and-take with the other side of the political spectrum without personalizing differences.

People should be able to have reasonable differences of opinion on issues without being labeled "good" or "bad" people, he stressed. "I learned to get a lot of what I wanted by giving the other side some of what they wanted, too."

Giuliani, 63, also noted that he can make his party a national party again, competing for the electoral votes in every states — including New York and California.

And all this is not to say that the former mayor failed to portray himself as a rock-ribbed Republican. To the contrary, he railed against the "nanny" socialist state he believes Democrats are trying to create — "We're not socialists, we're Americans" — and declared "radical Islam" to be the country's number one enemy — "The Democrats can't even bring themselves to say those words . . . it's like fighting World War II without using the word Nazis".

Declaring that "America is not about defeat", Giuliani stressed that Americans — and especially, perhaps, the American media — should not "prejudge" defeat in Iraq. He pointed to a opinion piece in Monday's New York Times — written, he said, by two men affiliated with the liberal Brooking Institution think tank — in which the authors declared that conditions way well be improving in that Asian country.

Giuliani totally rejected any call for a national health care system — "If they make health care free it will end up being too expensive" — and stated the real goal should be to make private health insurance cheaper by using market forces to drive down the price. He also stated that instead of worrying about our current trade deficit with China we should be concentrating on selling them the things they need as a foundation for a modern economy like ours, items that will cost a lot more than the things we buy from them, he said.

In response to a question, Giuliani acknowledged that the job of American president is really "too heavy" for any of the people, including himself, who aspire to the position; and he said that any man or woman who cannot admit that fact lacks the humility necessary to do a good job.