The Washington Post has a nice description of Giuliani blowing off potential voters who want to shake his hand.

While it’s too early to write Giuliani’s campaign obituary, it’s not hard to see his weaknesses as a candidate. He seems constitutionally resistant to lengthy sessions of flesh-pressing and to uncontrolled campaign dialogue. He favors long, discursive speeches and generally limits questions to a handful, when he takes questions at all. Contact is across a rope line, generally — except when he must walk across a room to an exit, where bodyguards keep the curious at bay with deftly placed forearms, if necessary.

Want to know why? As any New Yorker will tell you, it’s because Rudy is an asshole.

(Sorry, but it’s true.)

The somewhat more sophisticated explanation: Giuliani doesn’t really believe in democracy. He believes in a hierarchy of citizenry in which he is at the top controlling the masses. (A small but symbolic example: We New Yorkers still have to deal with ridiculous iron gates Giuliani placed across certain New York avenues to force people to cross the street at certain points.)

Giuliani is cold, arrogant, patronizing, mean, bullying, and has fascistic tendencies. He would, I think, if elected, be a greater threat to the Constitution than Dick Cheney has been. And he’d do it all in the name of keeping us safe….but the truth is that he’d do it because he gets off on power.

In New Hampshire, where Giuliani led in the polls early and then collapsed by December, one of the former mayor’s appearances ended when aides asked attendees to remain in their seats so he could quickly leave the building and get to his next stop.

“I couldn’t figure out what he was doing,” said Andrew Smith, director of the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire, who was there. “Was there some kind of security consideration? Did he fear that some old Rotarian lady had a butter knife? That kind of thing really hurt him here.“

There is an overwhelming narcissism in Giuliani, some/much of which was present pre-9/11, but which was deepened by Giuliani’s sense of his own importance on that day. (And, indeed, he was important on 9/11.)

I used to think that Giuliani was simply cynical about exploiting 9/11 for political gain. Now, I’ve come to suspect that he has so deeply internalized that experience that it has permeated his entire world view, like the little black oily alien virus that used to creep into people’s eyes on The X-Files. Hence all this nonsense about security. Giuliani believes that he is the only man who can save the world…and thus, every bad guy in the world wants to take a shot at him.

In response to a query about whether he would be afraid of getting killed politically if he tried to greatly cut taxes, he grinned and boomed: “They’ll kill me? The Mafia never killed me. You think I’m scared of them?“

This is a very dangerous man. We are fortunate that his political career is almost over.