Quote of the day: Gail Collins scrutinizes the bona fides of Mr. Security and reports that the security that really matters to Rudy is . . . his own!

"The Giuliani presidential campaign is based on the idea that he understands that the world is a dangerous place and knows the steps that need to be taken to protect us. But his real conviction has always seemed to be that the world was a dangerous place for him. . . .

"If the vision of city police officers cooling their heels outside his mistress's home in the Hamptons is troubling, it's not because of the moral implications. It's a reminder that Rudy is one of those people who doesn't handle power well. The more important he becomes, the more impossible he becomes."

--Gail Collins, in her Saturday NYT column, "Rudy's Security Blanket"

It's a pleasure to see Gail Collins hitting her stride in her return to columnizing. Nobody has a better eye or (especially) ear for telling detail. I'd heard about her for some time during her first thumb-sucking stint, with the New York Daily News, before she joined that glorious, giddy experiment in newspapering, New York Newsday, becoming perhaps the shiniiest star in a firmament of columnists that also included the glittering likes of Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin, Sydney Schanberg, and Pete Hamill.

(Naturally the plug had to be pulled on New York Newsday, on the brink of hitting its break-even point--en route to actually making money--in unexpectedly quick time, by the brain-dead Times-Mirror suits who apparently felt it was distracting them from their work destroying the L.A. Times. These were suits so incompetent that they soon, though not soon enough to save New York Newsday, had to be sent to suit heaven, giving way to the even dimmer-witted suits of the Tribune Co., who then had to be replaced by . . . well, let's not get started on the unspeakable Sam Zell.)

Saturday Gail got to thinking about Rudy's "bad week." ("Or, as he might put it, suffering persecutions never seen upon this planet since Mel Gibson was tortured on the rack, castrated, disemboweled and beheaded in 'Braveheart.'") You remember:

* the increasing attention--including Michael Cooper's report in the NYT--being paid to Rudy's campaign-trail habit of "stretching facts or replacing them with more dramatic, more interesting, more untrue ones";

* his unfortunate Florida debate performance;

* the cavalcade of TV appearances by his "protege" Bernie Kerik "in news clips captioned 16-COUNT FEDERAL INDICTMENT";

* and, finally, Ben Smith's Politico.com report "about the peculiar accounting practices the Giuliani administration had used for security details that guarded Rudy when he was out of town pursuing nonmayoral ventures such as golf and adultery," whereby "the bills were stashed away under the budgets of obscure city agencies like the Loft Board and--oh, dear--the Office for People With Disabilities."

Rudy said the story sounded like a "hit job" to him, aimed at reminding primary voters about his divorce-studded private life. Actually, LoftBoardgate is a reminder not of what Rudy does behind closed doors, but of his inability to keep them shut. When he was mayor, his sex life spilled into weird press conferences and court fights over who got custody of Gracie Mansion. Lately, he's contented himself with interrupting his speeches to accept strange cellphone calls from the latest wife.

It's fitting that Giuliani's first big campaign crisis wound up being about his special subject: security. When he was mayor, he got a whole lot of it. The city was at one point paying for police guards to protect and transport not only Rudy, his children and his elderly mother, but also both his wife and his mistress. Really, they were thisclose to assigning a detail to the family retriever and a springer spaniel he was courting down the block.

The Giuliani presidential campaign is based on the idea that he understands that the world is a dangerous place and knows the steps that need to be taken to protect us. But his real conviction has always seemed to be that the world was a dangerous place for him. After American embassies were bombed in East Africa, his administration responded by blocking off the driveways to City Hall, barring protesters and politicians from their traditional press conference site on the building steps, and banishing tourists. Meanwhile, behind the barricades, the mayor was planning to put the city's emergency command center inside the best-known terrorist target in America.

Does this sound like a good plan, people? Do you want the next president putting a nuclear missile at Camp David while he moves the Situation Room to the Louisiana flood plain?

The conflation of the safety of Rudy with the safety of New York reached its peak on 9/11, when the entire public security leadership of the city left ground zero in order to protect the mayor in his walk uptown. And then there was the aftermath, when he tried to postpone the mayoral election under the theory that the factor most critical to our survival was his continued presence at the helm.

If the vision of city police officers cooling their heels outside his mistress's home in the Hamptons is troubling, it's not because of the moral implications. It's a reminder that Rudy is one of those people who doesn't handle power well. The more important he becomes, the more impossible he becomes.

It's a nightmare, the specimens the GOP has assembled for its 2008 "presidential field." But is there a worse nightmare than the specter of a President Giuliani?

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