Rudy Giuliani: Making a Mountain of Money on Misery

From The Carpetbagger Report:

Rudy Giuliani’s stature took a bit of a hit when he became a Bush campaign attack dog last year — going so far, at one point, to start blaming U.S. troops for the administration’s mistakes — but the former New York mayor still seems to consider himself presidential material.

But if his gutter politics on Bush’s behalf didn’t damage his appeal among the Republican faithful, I wonder if trying to profit from a natural disaster will damage his standing.

The most vivid recent example occurred on Feb. 9 in Columbia, S.C. Mr. Giuliani had initially been booked by the South Carolina Hospital Association through the Washington Speakers Bureau to speak for his usual $100,000 fee. But then a massive tsunami devastated South Asia and “we just didn’t feel that a big old party was the right thing,” said Patti Smoake, the hospital association’s spokeswoman. Instead, the South Carolinians held a fund-raiser called “From South Carolina to South Asia.”

Mr. Giuliani agreed to speak at the new event. He even wrote a $20,000 check to the Red Cross, the event’s beneficiary, according to figures cited by a South Carolina hospital official and obtained by The Observer. He batted away the inevitable political speculation that accompanied his visit to the crucial Republican primary state, telling a local reporter he was visiting “because I enjoy coming to South Carolina and because this is a worthy cause.”

Mr. Giuliani didn’t mention it at the time, but he also walked away from the tsunami benefit with $80,000 at a time when celebrities from Bill Clinton and the first President Bush to George Clooney were donating time to the relief effort. There was nothing illegal, or even particularly unusual, about his taking a fee from a charity event. But taking the money was not the move of a man whose political future depends on the good will of the voters of South Carolina, the decisive state in the 2000 Republican primary widely viewed as the immovable object between a socially liberal Republican like Mr. Giuliani and the nomination.

After the event, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Hospitals Association said “she was not even sure whether the benefit’s total take had exceeded Mr. Giuliani’s fee.”

Emphasis mine.