misunderestimation

That thud you just heard was the sound of a presidential campaign tripping on its first step.

The presidential campaign strategy for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani – complete with a $100 million fundraising target for this year – is out of the bag.

The 140-page schedule for the Republican’s budding presidential bid was reported in Tuesday’s editions of the New York Daily News.

The paper said an anonymous source obtained the document after it was left behind on a campaign swing in 2006, but Giuliani spokeswoman Sunny Mindel claimed it was actually pilfered from luggage from a private flight.

What does the Giuliani camp have to say:

A Giuliani spokeswoman said this afternoon that the document belonged to a staff member and was not official strategy, but “simply someone’s ideas which were committed to paper over three months ago.” The spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, also asserted that the document had been stolen, photocopied, and then returned in a piece of luggage belonging to a staff member that had gone missing.

Not really the best way to kick things off, but you have to admire their way they are willing to share information with the opposition. Speaking of the opposition, what advise do they have for Giuliani?

“It’s amazing it wasn’t locked up in the headquarters … it was sort of naive,” said an adviser to one of Giuliani’s possible Republican opponents. “If they think this is bad, they better buckle their chinstraps, because as far as a presidential campaign goes they ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Truer words were never spoken. This is going to be a very interesting campaign on both sides of the aisle.

Below the Beltway: None of this is anything we didn’t already know. How it got out to the media, though, may be a more interesting question.

Feministe: I’d bet money that McCain’s behind the theft — or rather, someone from his campaign (plausible deniability). Right now, Giuliani is polling better than McCain, but it’s McCain’s turn, dammit. And dollars to donuts he learned his lesson in the 2000 South Carolina primary, when he was the target of a whispering campaign alleging that his adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate black daughter. He’s not going to let that happen to him again, but he’s damn well going to make sure he does it to someone else first.

Dizzy Thinks: Presumably the source of the document is someone from the McCain team. After all what other serious rivals does Guiliani have? He must be spitting that someone left the document behind for others to find, or was it deliberately left behind? Either way, it may not bode well for him.

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