Violet picked up a revealing little detail in the NY Times coverage of Huckabee’s inability to keep a lid on the fact that he helped release a known rapist from prison because he was enamored of a right wing conspiracy theory/to get back at Bill Clinton.
It has all the markings of salacious, tabloidian detail that can haunt a candidate, a lawmaker, an elected official, who walks and stalks the halls of criminal justice, who has, as he has said, weighed decisions on whether to impose capital punishment, and has ordered death.
She did us a favor and looked up the word, in case you don’t know what it means.
Main Entry: sa·la·cious
Function: adjective
1 : arousing or appealing to sexual desire or imagination : lascivious
2 : lecherous, lustful
There’s a couple of things going on simultaneously here. The first is that this is just more evidence that reality is the opposite of what hysterical anti-feminists claim—it’s not that feminists think rape and sex are the same thing, but the larger society that thinks that, and feminists are the ones who beg to differ. There’s some confusion that’s been sown on that point to make us look bad, which implies that there’s something bad about collapsing the difference between sex and rape, so I expect all the people who hit the fainting couch over the misinterpretations of Andrea Dworkin’s work to be writing furious letters to the Times now, because they really did refuse to distinguish between the gleeful copulations we all strive for and the rape and then rape and murder of two women.
The other thing that jumps out at me is that this small detail confirms the larger picture we’re all seeing, which is that the mainstream media is inexplicably carrying the water for a right wing nut who has, in the past, openly advocated for a return to a more enslaved version of marriage, who believes right wing conspiracy theories about Bill Clinton to the point that he’s allowed someone to die before he faced up to reality, and who probably, heart in his hearts, would like to hang homosexuals in the town square a la rural Iran. Why do I say that this is more evidence they’re carrying water for him? Well, the word “salacious” signals that this is nothing but a gossipy sex scandal. beneath the attention of serious people. (Of course, the same serious people breathlessly covered Bill Clinton’s non-rape adultery until the bitter end—leaving one with the sick impression that many in the mainstream media think consensual sex is more scandalous than rape and murder.)
But this is an important story, not because of the weird “soft on crime” nonsense or anything like that. This is a serious story because the voters deserve to know whether or not they are voting for a black helicopter-believing insane person, and probably a rape denialist to boot. Huckabee fell for the story that Dumond was an innocent victim, that his 17-year-old victim (and cousin of Bill Clinton’s) was just a patsy for the bloodthirty, crazed, evil Clinton family, and when confronted with piles of evidence that Dumond was a serial rapist, he ignored it in favor of the right wing conspiracy theory. Voters need to know that he’s far from the sweet, if kind of conservative, Christian the media is portraying, but instead someone who will truck with any level of crazy bullshit, so long as it fits his hateful worldview. And instead of doing their duty, many mainstream media sources are poo-poohing the seriousness of this issue, that a bona fide conspiracy nut (actually two, if you count Ron Paul) is a contender in the race, and playing like it’s no big thing.
So why are they carrying his water? This is why I consider my weekly attendance at Drinking Liberally to be “research”—fellow liberal drinkers pointed out that a Huckabee split could siphon votes off Mitt Romney and give the primaries to Giuliani. That fits in with my sense that Giuliani is the general favorite in the mainstream media. The New York media is probably rooting for a Giuliani/Clinton race the most, since they’ve been covering these candidates in detail for a long time, meaning less research and more sales.
47 Responses to “The salacious mainstream affection for Huckabee”
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This is a serious story because the voters deserve to know whether or not they are voting for a black helicopter-believing insane person
He rejects evolution in favor of Genesis. We already know he’s batshit insane.
This just adds misogynist to crazy. Sounds like the perfect candidate for the Right.
Grr . . . I anti-heart Huckabee.
Speaking as a New Yorker, I would say that Murdoch’s NEW YORK POST is certainly going to support Giuliani. So too, the DAILY NEWS. I suspect the NEW YORK TIMES will be very cautious. Remember: we here had eight years of Giuliani, and he was getting quite unpopular just before 9/11. Even his supposedly golden performance during the emergency only partly improved his image. And his effort to extend his term as mayor, because of the terrorist attack, met with rejection.
His performance during the 9/11 crisis, is now coming in for well-deserved revisionist criticism, in particular, having to do with the health needs of people who worked in the World Trade Center site.
He was always unpopular with people of color, and the police shootings that happened several times during his term further alienated many. One of the most egregious had happened not so long before. That was the killing of Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian-American, accosted on the street by a Narcotics Detective who proffered a controlled substance. Dorismond indignantly rebuffed him, the detective didn’t back off, and in the ensuing scuffle shot him dead.
Giuliani flew to the detective’s defense, making a statement that Dorismond, was “no altar boy”, and, probably illegally, exposing a confidential juvenile court record about a minor incident when Dorismond had been thirteen. (He and another boy had a dispute about a small sum of money, there was a bit of fisticuffs, and the matter was “adjusted at intake” in the Family Court, which means he never went before a judge, and the charges went nowhere.).
In fact, Dorismond literally was a former altar boy, and a graduate of Bishop Loughlin High School, of which Giuliani himself is also a graduate.
This came after the choke-hold death of Anthony Báez, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, and the anal rape with a broken broomstick of another Haitian immigrant.
In 2000 and early 2001, Giuliani’s reputation had suffered because of his churlish behavior towards his quite dignified wife, Donna Hanover, and his romance with Judith Nathan. It has now come out that the expenses of his police security detail, on his visits to Judith Nathan’s place in the Hamptons were charged off to obscure city agencies, like the Loft Board, and the Office for the Disabled.
If Giuliani is the Republican presidential candidate, I am sure he will not carry New York City.
I believe all that Celsus, but my question is: Does the media want the race to be a Giuliani/Clinton match-up? I think so. Doesn’t mean they want Giuliani to win necessarily.
Well, more than that. Some think that shilling for Huckabee offers protection against hysterical right wing claim that the press has a “liberal bias.” Of course, nothing will convince the tightie righties that there’s no such thing as liberal bias, so it’s an exercise in futility.
Oh god…
That wouldn’t be surprising to me, and that’s exactly the election I hope *not* to see. So…yay.
(The election I *would* like to see is Kucinich vs. Paul, since if Paul won he’d at least not start any more wars, which is more than you count on from anybody else in the Republican field. But of course that particular contest ain’t gonna happen…)
I dunno — I think they actually like Huckabee for Huckabee, because he has a reputation for being “funny,” which makes hanging around on the campaign bus amusing. That’s how John McCain won their hearts lo these many years ago.
These are blasé people who’d rather talk about personality than policy because personality is what *they* see, or think they see, so it validates their own worth. Facts are hard work. Anecdotes are easy.
One thing I think plays strongly in these mysterious and fickle media obsessions with various candidates (which swap around periodically, depending on the political winds) is the need to have a contest.
If one candidate seems to be way ahead, often their affections shift to a lesser candidate to make the race “more interesting”. Whether this is a conscious decision or not is unclear.
The really interesting thing awaiting us this election season is to see how coverage will evolve in the wake of ’08’s extremely front-loaded primary arrangement. Since the two candidates will have effectively been chosen by February, there’s 9-months of 24-hour news cycles to fill, with the main candidates already set in concrete.
I think we’re in for one hell of a drawn-out, WWI-style trench-warfare, mind numbing, and dispiriting election year. There will be no winners in ‘08, especially not the citizens of America…
In addition to MikeEss, I think there’s also the aspect of boredom. Remember when McCain was the reporters’ darling the last election cycle? Now they never talk about him and have glommed onto Huckabee. Because, gosh, he’s just so darn likeable.
It’s the political equivalent of chasing Brittney Spears stories.
According to Christopher Bird, a.k.a. Mightygodking, Huckabee also “…actually manages to seem occasionally human and warm-blooded, and exudes ‘I would love to have a beer with him’-ness. (Which, incidentally, is not something any other country ever thinks about. Seriously, I voted for Jean Chretien’s Liberals on multiple occasions and I’m pretty sure Chretien himself would be kind of a pain in the ass to have a drink with. Also, he would probably strangle me.)”
If anybody is worried about Huckabee going all the way as opposed to just being a spoiler for Romney, incidentally, MGK tells you why you shouldn’t worry. Probably has a point; by the same logic how many people do you think would never vote Kucinich because he’s A) short and B) a little goofy-looking (sorry Dennis)?
(I realize this is the second time I have pimped this blog, but I can’t help pimping that which I love…NOT in the absolutely literal sense involving flesh and blood people, mind you. That’s important to clarify.)
Anyhoo…
If they’re so worried about that, they should go all out and follow Fox News’ lead. At least then they’d be so over the top that people would think twice about their credibility.
At the risk of becoming unpopular, I am really fucking sick of media pulling their punches or not even punching at all because they’re afraid of how it will make them look, never mind that they might actually owe it to the people to cover certain things. (The “risk of becoming unpopular” thing was a joke, of course, but seriously, this pisses me off.)
Finally, thanks for all the info, Celsus. No one part of it seems worth quoting more than the rest. Did the Louima thing happen on his watch, btw?
“These are blasé people who’d rather talk about personality than policy because personality is what *they* see, or think they see, so it validates their own worth. Facts are hard work. Anecdotes are easy.”
I think they also fall quite easily into a self-reinforcing belief that anecdotes are really more valuable than facts, because (somehow) they are more revealing of who a person really is. (Actual evidence frequently to the contrary…)
Let’s face it. Without that kind of asinine/juvenile/delusional/wishful thinking, how could a rich scion of New England blue-bloods - who slouched his way through Yale and Harvard, avoided Vietnam via his father’s connections, who lived/partied in a drug and alcohol-induced fog, then “ran” several companies into the ground before getting “rehabilitated” into being governor of Texas - be transformed into a man of the people, a genuine Texan, a humble rancher and businessman who would be fun to have a beer with?
Without all that bullshit, he would never have made it far enough to get selected by SCOTUS to be president…
Of course they do. They’re both corporate tools.
Why don’t the polls ever contain Kucinich as a choice? Why didn’t Wolf Blitzer give all the candidates equal time to talk?
It’s a Hillary/Obama ticket no matter what the Democratic voters want. Two inveterate politicians.
I don’t understand the GOP slate choices, except that they know the next President has Bush’s enormous messes to clean up, and belt-tightening never makes a President popular.
They want the Dems to win in ‘08, fix things but become unpopular by doing so, then coast back to power in ‘12 claiming that the necessary reforms are what caused all the problems and that MORE TAX CUTS for the wealthy are needed to goose the economy.
The fact that 3 men who believe in Creationism can be serious candidates for President makes the baby jesus cry for the failed experiment that was America.
Maybe it’s the same reason every Red Sox/Yankee game takes up 10 times its proportional share of national sports discussion airtime.
Norbiz gets it in one.
Does the media want the race to be a Giuliani/Clinton match-up? I think so.
Well, yeah, because Dean & Deluca doesn’t have carry-out to Little Rock. They learned the hard way that there is nothing to do, no one of importance to meet and nothing to eat in Arkansas 16 years back.
They would rather cover a horse race in their own front yards, because traveling is hard work. Romney-Obama would be okay, because the Palmer House knows how to send up a decent steak.
And on your main point, I’ve given up hassling the most liberal of MSM about conflating rape and sex, because Canute had more influence over the tides.
Actually, in Alberta, this more or less carried Ralph Klein’s regime for it’s entire duration through scandal after scandal. Stories of him frequenting Calgary’s most famous sleazy taverns were circulated during every election, and when the St Louis finally closed down the local media called it the “end of an era”.
The “I would love to have a beer with him-ness” seems to operate less at the federal level even in Alberta but I’d be hard-pressed to say that Canadians are in any way more sophisticated voters than Americans. We are fortunate, in some ways, that the ridiculous state-by-state primary system that operates int the US has no real parallel here and most ordinary people don’t really care that much which candidates parties they don’t support field.
Aside from the fact that Paul is the one repub candidate possibly as insane as Huckabee?
Aside from the fact that should Paul become president he’d utterly destroy the US thanks to a political philosophy that is about as far from reality as it’s possible to get?
Yeah sure … personally I’d rather run the risk of a little more war.
There’s a couple of times going on simultaneously here. [sic]
Speaking of Freudian slips . . . !
Back to the beginning re: “salacious,” I hadn’t realized the word was that much more specifically sexual than “lurid.” (And I thought “tawdry” was in the same field of meaning, too, until I looked that up just now.)
Considering the current PM, labyrus, I wouldn’t claim that Canadians vote much more intelligently either. But during the time I’ve been following politics (since 2003, I’m a little embarassed to say, and even then I was paying more attention to what happened south of our border than I was in my own back yard), it’s seemed like it’s less about personality and more about reputation or policy. Paul Martin has never struck me as very charismatic at all, and Stephen Harper is kind of stiff, yet both made it to the top of the government. While it’s true that you’re not voting for an individual but rather for a party in Canadian elections, you know whose chances of being PM increase when you cast that vote.
I doubt any of us would want to be judged on an anecdote about how we behaved in just one instance if we weren’t able to pick which anecdote it was. People have got their good moments and their bad (percentage of each varies with the person) and an anecdote only shows you one or the other. That’s if it even happened in the first place…
I’d say I was really good at stating the obvious, but evidently this isn’t obvious to as many people as it should be. *sigh*
Al Franke said it too: the media is lazy.
My ignorance is showing again, I suppose, but if a Republican had to win and I had the power to pick which Republican it was, then so far it appears to me that one could do worse than Paul.
Because while I don’t agree with him on guns or health care to name just two issues, he did vote against the Patriot Act, he has stated that he is pro- rather than anti-habeas corpus, there’s the anti-war position, being against the illegal wiretapping, and he does seem to care about the environment.
It could be that what we’re seeing is very different from what we’d get, a la Bush, or that he will actually change into an entirely different person and possibly lose his mind a la McCain.
But when the other choices are Giuliani, McCain, Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo fergawdsake…by comparison Paul looks good.
(Tell me, btw, if you want me to drop this and take it to e-mails or something, since I did wonder about whether responding would derail the thread but didn’t want to just ignore what had been said to me nor e-mail Sarah unprompted.)
Um, aren’t you overanalyzing, maybe?
Did it occur to anyone complaining about the use of the word “salacious” that, especially in context, it might not have anything to do with the rape but instead with the story? I’ve heard that type of usage, albeit more often with the word “sexy” as a general adjective that will describe a story or item that will attract attention, just like, well, sex would, and at the same time is fun/appealing/rewarding for the journalist in question to work on.
In this case it’s a story about a Republican, theoretically a law and order type, who freed a man who went on to commit two heinous acts. That’s a sexy story (using the definition of “sexy” I used above).
There’s also the point that an additional definition of “salacious” is “obscene”, which in this case fits the passage in question perfectly, as “obscene” can refer to a great deal more than sex.
Sure, in context of rape the word may have been badly chosen, or perhaps the writer and editor are morons who used it deliberately, but it’s also entirely possible that it wasn’t intentional or insightful into the psychology of the writer.
And, of course, there’s one other possibility, and that’s that I am overanalyzing as well. The writer may not have known what the word actually meant, and tried to engage in some sesquipedalian loquaciousness, with unfortunate results.
Speaking of Dorismond, this Tom Tomorrow cartoon always chokes me up.
Why that man doesn’t have a Pulitzer yet, I’ll never know.
Ron Paul in a nutshell at about.com.
(D’OH! Oh well, at least I put my response in a separate blockquote that time…)
I would love to see Clinton/Obama/Edwards/Richardson v. any Republican. Those four can beat any GOP candidate thrown at them. Hell, if Kucinich garners a lot of support, he could beat any of the GOP candidates as well.
Why is this? Each of the Republican candidates support at least one thing that Bush supports. So in essence, that makes all of the Republicans George Bush in disguise.
As for Huckabee, he is slandering good men by saying that they freed Dumond. Huckabee should just quit the race while he can. And if he does become the GOP nominee for president, that is great news for Democrats. We can use Huck’s anti-woman record against him, we can use his “Max Tax” against him and we can use the Wayne Dumond issue against him. In addition to the aforementioned “Republicans are George Bush in wolf’s clothing” against him.
Dave over at Orcinus has had a number of excellent posts on the problems with Paul ever since Glenn Greenwald mentioned Paul favorably (yes, I know it wasn’t an endorsement).
On Paul’s old style old school nativism
Some problems with his followers and the fact that he hasn’t distanced himself from them.
His anti-abortion and pro-gun record in congress
Oh, just go over and read the rest. Paul is any thing but good, except for his opposition to the war.
Just to circle back to the original post: wow, you are so right that the use of the term “salacious” is unbelievably telling. Like a rape-murder scandal registers in the same adjectival category as a woo! affairs with nekkid ladies! scandal. I don’t know what to think anymore - nobody deserves the kind of leaders the U.S. gets, and yet somehow maybe the U.S. does kinda get the leaders it deserves.
I was going for it until the contemptible Andrea Dworkin was dragged into it….
Just to circle back to the original post: wow, you are so right that the use of the term “salacious” is unbelievably telling.
It’s telling if the writer knew what the word actually meant, and if it was used intentionally (consciously or subconsciously). Go to 10 average English-speaking people on the street and ask them to define “salacious”. I’ll give you good odds that the majority of them will have no idea. Give them the quoted text and ask them, and I’ll give you good odds that they think it means “juicy” or something equivalent (and no, not in a sexual manner).
Lots of words have had their meaning changed because people don’t know the original definition and think it means something else. A good example is “gunsel”. Dashiell Hammett snuck it into his fiction and his editor (and most of the public reading it) had no idea what it meant, and other writers, also ignorant of its meaning, started using it and have to this day (it even appeared in “Deadwood”). It does not mean “gunmen” or “mook” or whatever. It was a slang term for a young homosexual partner.
It’s entirely possible that the writer didn’t know what “salacious” meant, assuming its meaning from other contexts, but getting it wrong, and the msitake was only realized after it was printed.
The media chooses the candidate _it_ wants to have a beer with, not the candidate that the people would like. The reason why the media is at variance with reality is the same reason that the aristocracy is surprised when the peasants revolt. They swim in cleaner waters. Our problems are not their problems.
According to Christopher Bird, a.k.a. Mightygodking, Huckabee also “…actually manages to seem occasionally human and warm-blooded, and exudes ‘I would love to have a beer with him’-ness.
Which is interesting, considering– does Huckabee drink? I’d be quite surprised if he does, what with the ex-Baptist-Minister thing. Google finds TNR quoting Anderson Cooper claiming that Huckabee “has never had a sip of beer“…
Now, I’m not implying there’s anything the least bit wrong with Huckabee not drinking. I just think it would be fascinating if indeed for the second time in a row, our electorate “would like to have a beer with” a non-drinker.
Go to 10 average English-speaking people on the street and ask them to define “salacious”.
I suspect all 10 would not get a job at the NY Times due to that lack of knowledge. Presumably, a professional writer with an editor is a little bit better at the vocabulary. Your weak attempts at trying to pin me for “overanalyzing” are kind of sad. It’s like you can’t read a link or something, because if you did, you’d realize the entire article is trying to minimize the issue. One word is not the point—after all, they also stated that this was worthier of the tabloid media, a deliberate attempt to let him off the hook on an important story. Unless you want to argue that your average person doesn’t know what a “tabloid” is and that the average person’s vocabulary is a good measure of the likely vocabulary of someone who managed to secure a writing job at the biggest newspaper in the country.
Presumably, a professional writer with an editor is a little bit better at the vocabulary
As I pointed out, professional writers (who’ve been recognized for their writing) with professional editors have misused the term “gunsel” for decades because no one bothered to look up what it meant. Everyone thought they knew what it meant.
And I’m not trying to minimize the overall slant of the story. I’m simply amused by the way that people are trying to claim that one word somehow provides a deep understanding of the mental processes at work, when there’s other, simpler explanations including that one or the other party doesn’t have the correct definition.
See “niggardly” for examples.
In fact, the point of the article being slanted would, I think, tend to support this. Tabloids thrive on “salacious stories”. People could easily misinterpret that as “gossipy”, or “dirty” (as in getting the dirt on someone) or whatnot.
Look, I’m well-read, have always tested very well on vocabulary and comprehension, have had writing published, as well as having done proofreading and editing for other people, and I wasn’t aware until this small kerfuffle started that “salacious” had a very specific definition related to sex. I always thought it had a larger, non-specific meaning.
So yes, the term “salacious” probably was chosen to diminish the story, but not because of the sex but because they thought it had some of the non-sexual meanings I’d listed. As I said, they’re using the word to refer to the story, not the acts described within it.
Somewhat OT:
“…this is just more evidence that reality is the opposite of what hysterical anti-feminists claim—it’s not that feminists think rape and sex are the same thing, but the larger society that thinks that, and feminists are the ones who beg to differ.”
I think that what this is, is evidence not so much that sex and rape are equivalent in the mind of the larger society, but that the mythos of rape wherein rape is the only kind of sex a human male can have with a human female without exposing himself to infestation by Girl Cooties* is still alive and well in the mind of the larger society. One of the things Bill Clinton did which infuriated lots of people was to allow himself to be hit on by a chick. Another thing Bill Clinton did which infuriated lots of people was to stay married to a woman with whom he appears to have had a consensual understanding regarding his extracurricular affairs. Altogether there was what must have seemed in many quarters to be a depressing pall of consensuality blanketing the whole Clinton ménage.
No wonder Clinton’s enemies eventually tried to cast him as a rapist.
*Ruth Herschberger wrote extensively about this back in 1948.
KeithM — your point completely misses the point. Let’s say that the average joe on the street does think “salacious” means “juicy” or “dirty” or “gossipy”.
Those are terms appropriately appiicable to stories about a sex scandal. They are crazy and effed up when applied to a rape-murder scandal.
Rob, (verb)er of (noun)s
December 6, 2007 at 11:10 am
exudes ‘I would love to have a beer with him’-ness. (Which, incidentally, is not something any other country ever thinks about.
Those of us in the deepest south (i.e. Australia) beg to differ.
Actually, in Alberta, this more or less carried Ralph Klein’s regime for it’s entire duration through scandal after scandal. Stories of him frequenting Calgary’s most famous sleazy taverns were circulated during every election, and when the St Louis finally closed down the local media called it the “end of an era”.
The main reason Klein lasted so long is that the opposition parties are, to be frank, sort of useless in Alberta. This is handily shown by the example of Stockwell Day. The fact he’s an idiot was quickly shown at the national level with a minimal amount of effort on the part of the Liberals. There’s nothing that couldn’t have been pointed out by opposition parties in Alberta.
As for Ralph himself, everyone knew he was an alcoholic but given the total incompetence of the opposition, it’s not like people had a lot of choice.
The NYT considers this salacious only because Clinton is involved. If Huckabee had bought into a wacky Bush conspiracy theory and released a rapist/killer the Times would’ve used a different word if they covered the story at all.
Of course the corporate media are propagandizing for Huckabee. Militant fundamentalists keep fundies distracted and easier to rip off by corporate interests.
The local media (as opposed to the New York-based national media) hasn’t even *begun* to make what it knows about Giuliani known to the rest of the country. And they have a grudge against him now.
With any luck, this will all find its way into the race if he’s the nominee. But the national media tends to disdain the tabs, who have all the really juicy stuff. So who knows how much will actually get out.
Sorry, Keith, but salacious is a more common word than gunsel. You used average person for your metric, because you figured that was an easier sell and were either too slow to realize that no average person of average vocabulary becomes a writer for the Times, or you were hoping no one would catch it. The entire fucking article is water-carrying; the word is a particularly egregious example of the entire dismissive tone of the article. You know it; so why are you so quick to be dismissive? Do you just enjoy playing the wise man shaking his finger at the hysterics or do you have a pro-Huckabee slant to your thinking?
According to Christopher Bird, a.k.a. Mightygodking, Huckabee also “…actually manages to seem occasionally human and warm-blooded, and exudes ‘I would love to have a beer with him’-ness. (Which, incidentally, is not something any other country ever thinks about.
Can I just rant about how much this drives me insane? I think about all the people I enjoy having beers with, and it strikes me that though they are lovable, fun people, a significant minority of them are barely capable of managing a pizza shop, much less a whole country. Why this became a serious litmus test among certain, vocal subcultures in this country is beyond me, but I know a couple of people who actually think like that and it drives me insane.
You know the New York Times pundits keep attacking Hillary Clinton, right?
A professional writer has a responsibility to know the meaning of the words they use.
“You know the New York Times pundits keep attacking Hillary Clinton, right?”
Doesn’t mean they don’t want her to be in the race. She’s got brand recognition, already has whole groups of avid, drooling, “fans” ready to escalate their hate, etc.
As Amanda said: “The New York media is probably rooting for a Giuliani/Clinton race the most, since they’ve been covering these candidates in detail for a long time, meaning less research and more sales.”
They probably still want the matchup, even if they dislike both Giuliani and Clinton…