Rudy Giuliani Takes Aim at the White House

GOP officials said Monday that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has filed papers to create the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Exploratory Committee, Inc. The four-page filing will establish a panel of advisors and allow him to raise money for a campaign to bid for the presidency, and to travel the country to drum up support.

Giuliani was held in high regard throughout the country in the days and months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on his city, as he walked through the chaos and destruction and embraced the devastated city to help bring it to its feet and stand tall again. The images of his tireless support for rescue workers and his impassioned encouragement to New Yorkers were replayed on television for months.

As a result of his actions during his final days as New York City’s mayor, Giuliani’s name has carried significant weight in political arenas. This year he became a headliner for the Republican Party, traveling across the country to support candidates in major elections. His name is widely recognized and respected, and according to popularity polls, he enjoys roughly the same level of support as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Sen. John McCain. Although Rice has continued to insist that she has no plans to run for the presidency, most political analysts expect McCain to file his papers soon.

As a U.S. attorney, Giuliani led campaigns against organized crime and corruption. For two years in the Justice Department he oversaw all U.S. attorneys, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the U.S. Marshals Service. When he was first elected as mayor of New York City in 1993, he pledged to improve the city, and he did just that. He was the first Republican to take the helm of the Big Apple in decades, and during his tenure in the post he cut crime dramatically, and redeveloped and cleaned up run-down parts of the city.

As Time Magazine’s "Person of the Year" for 2001, Giuliani became an in-demand public speaker and GOP fundraiser. However, he is a moderate who supports abortion rights and gun control, two issues that will distance his political opinions from the majority of the GOP conservative base.

Giuliani has told reporters for months that he would wait until after the 2006 elections were over to decide whether or not he would run for president. His filing on Monday lists the purpose of the nonprofit corporation to be "to conduct federal ‘testing the waters’ activity under the Federal Election Campaign Act for Rudy Giuliani." His spokeswoman Sunny Mindel declined to comment about the filing.