LOS ANGELES
The fact that public officials have a right to a private life has nothing to do with a public official who calls a press conference to dump his wife simply because he thinks (incorrectly) that she is about to call a press conference to dump him for his public indiscretions.
That one can get this morsel from friends of Rudy Giuliani or his wife is an indication of how little the New York mayor's tribulations involve truly private matters and how much they relate to his public persona.
In a typical effort to apply logic to this mess, former Governor Mario Cuomo argued that the mayor couldn't possibly be intending to get out of his campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton for the US Senate. After all, a pol intending to quit a race would hardly make public an embarrassing situation that might remain less public in the aftermath of a withdrawal.
But logic is often of no use where the foibles of humans are concerned. The Giuliani imbroglio has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a life that has spun out of control at the direct expense of supporters and allies, and ultimately of the public from which he seeks a mandate for a new office. It's classic Rudy.
The one thought missing from the mayor's musings last week was any consideration of the public. Instead, every thought expressed was about himself - his ordeal, his indecision, his feelings. One gets used to rampant egomania in public life, but the politician who continuously communicates the notions that the campaign is all about him instead of the public is beyond myopic.
On an impulse last summer, I bet a hundred bucks that Giuliani would not be the GOP nominee for the Senate by the time the formal choice was made this month. Witnesses thought I deserved odds, but I went straight up for two reasons.
The first was my judgment after watching this weird bully for years that he was by nature a lord-it-over-everybody kind of guy - in pig heaven as mayor - and utterly incapable of committing himself to run for an office where getting along with others is everything. The second was a feeling that like most bullies, the mayor could not handle a tough challenge, and that once Mrs. Clinton's rookie goofs had faded, her candidacy would pose the toughest of challenges.
I still could lose my bet, but now that the odds are 50-50 at best, the last few days of nonstop soap opera have made me more confident of the primacy of my reasons.
It's not the prostate cancer. It's not the public mess of his marriage. It's not his crass, calculated and cruel public treatment of his wife. It's not what he and she have said about other women. It's not even his martinet-style of disparagement of all who would dare criticize. And it's not even his crude disregard for the civil rights of ordinary citizens, particularly people of color who are accosted by the occasional out-of-control police officer. The ranks of political leaders are filled with people with health, personal, and personality problems.
It's everything, a final feather on the scale that tips it over to a judgment that the mayor's life is too full of turmoil to leave room for diligent public service in Washington. Once you get past the tabloid sleaze and even the feelings of many that perhaps there is some justice in the world, what Giuliani has done is instructed us in the true meaning of the term private life, and its actual relation to what we call a public life.
The lives of public figures should include private zones, but the absence of accepted definition has produced informational anarchy in our ''anything goes'' culture. The best anybody can come up with is the notion that while private zones must exist, there can be moments when private behavior affects public performance directly and obviously.
The best statement of this came nearly a decade ago from Senator Edward Kennedy, whose life had been full of publicized turmoil. At some point, he said that day, the accumulation of private behavior just becomes too much to keep from affecting public performance or at least one's reputation in the public arena. He acknowledged that moment had come in his life, uttered the equivalent of a never again pledge, and proceeded to keep it.
The key to Kennedy's statement was his understanding that citizens who have no voice and no power are counting on him to speak and work for them, and that by definition requires a focused life. Since one should assume that voters don't elect New York senators solely for their entertainment value, the same goes for Giuliani.
The point extends to politics. Conservatives place great weight on defeating Mrs. Clinton, and not solely for hateful personal reasons. Giuliani has drained some $20 million in campaign cash from a national GOP effort that needs every dime. He has already let a great many people down. To the extent that he deserves sympathy, it is for his public display of an obviously messed-up person. But the sympathy must include an insistence that he put his life in order immediately. If he can't get his act together, the least he can do is not take it on the road.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
