Brother Meringoff has some heartfelt advice for Rudy Giuliani:

[T]here are several problems with constantly bragging in the first person about his tenure as mayor.

First, when a candidate keeps hitting the same note over and over, people quicky tire of hearing it. Moreover, it makes the candidate an easy target for ridicule.

Second, by talking so much about New York, Rudy is playing into the stereotype of New Yorkers as people who think that the rest of the country is basically a suburb of that city. That’s not a stereotype that’s likely to enhance Giuliani’s popularity in places like New Hampshire, where voters like to hear about themselves and their state. Nor is it likely to play well generally. Giuliani needs to talk more about his solutions for national problems and less about past successes dealing with New York’s.

Third, voters don’t like non-stop bragging. And Giuliani’s constant use of the first person singular is not only grating, it overstates his case. The crime reduction in New York city wasn’t all down to Rudy. The city was the beneficiary of positive demographic and other trends and, in any event, surely its citizens deserve some of the credit. It would be better if Rudy would say, for example, that under his leadership “we reduced shootings by 75%.

This, I think, basically boils down to, “Hey, Rudy, stop sounding like a New Yorker!”  That’s counsel that he’d do well to consider.

Besides, it’s not as though he’d ever carry New York in any case.

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You can’t, though, knock Rudy for not being up-front and forthright, even if some of his pre-emptive boasting is considerably less than credible.  Pity the same thing cannot be said of Mitt Romney, both in the questionable shenanigans of his “independent” supporters and his irresolute hedging on the war.  Heck, I still can’t fathom how Ron Paul keeps getting into these so-called debates, but there’s no question about his ankle-grabbing war stance.  With Mitt, to quote Zell Miller from three years ago about another prominent Bay State pol, “you get a ‘yes….no….maybe’ bowl o’ mush, that can only encourage our enemies and confuse our friends.”

I see a moment in the next primary “debate” in which Fred Thompson absolutely pantses Romney on this issue, and even more devastatingly than John McCain did the last time.  I don’t know that Mitt’s leads in Iowa and New Hampshire are robust enough to take many more self-inflicted gut shots, especially now that “the wild card” has taken the plunge.

UPDATE: Uh, this isn’t quite what I was envisioning….