From the Times article:

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Monday that he was seriously exploring whether he has "a chance" of winning the presidency in 2008, as he visited politically important Iowa and huddled with state advisers, donors to President Bush and other prominent Republicans.

...."My effort this year will be to help Republicans get elected, and then, quite honestly, as part of it, saying to myself, does it look like I have a chance in 2008? And make that decision after the 2006 election."

Let's review a little of his history. I'll start with a summary of his skeletons, and move on to his divorce woes. (Washington Post, 5/11/2000; Associated Press, 5/19/2000.)

Don't miss Rudi & Judi Forever by Steve Gilliard, one of the best pieces I've read about him.

Then there's his abysmal record on civil liberties, while he claims credit for winning the war on crime in New York -- but the credit was not his, it belonged to Bill Bratton. As one writer put it:

They specifically comment on the Mayor's racism; his attacks on freedom of speech; his habit of ordering his critics arrested; his war on the homeless and the poor; his policy of confiscating and forfeiting private property regardless of due process; his "bunker mentality"; his attacks on media freedom; his notion of issuing hollowpoint bullets to the police; his "work shall make you free" workfare initiative; his Hitler-like obsession with stadium building; his desire to fingerprint and take DNA samples from all newborn children;....

Several 9/11 victims have turned on him as well. Sisyphus Shrugged has more on the negatives to his 9/11 performance.

There's his continued support for Bernie Kerik after his embarrassing appointment and withdrawal as HSA Chief. (See this Newsday article and this Ny Daily News editorial, Rudy and Bernie Go Down in Flames.) One of Rudy Giuliani's last feats as Mayor was to rename the Manhattan Detention Center as the Bernard B. Kerik complex. Bernie, Rudy once said, is the "brother he never had." The NY Daily News even reported that Rudy had "cashed in a chit" to get Kerik the appointment.

Joyce Purnick in the New York Times had this to say about Rudy:

Most of America knows the heroic Rudolph W. Giuliani, celebrated for his masterful leadership after Sept. 11. But before the terrorist attacks, Mr. Giuliani's popularity had dropped at home. Even fans had tired of his aggressive style.

On the premise that it took tough leadership to tame New York, the former mayor conducted himself with unapologetic hubris, surrounding himself with a deferential inner circle - including Bernard B. Kerik as commissioner of correction and then commissioner of the police. The insular Giuliani team could be secretive, could play loose with people's rights and would even violate the law, attracting lawsuits that City Hall usually lost.

If the Giuliani administration wanted to keep public information from civic groups, elected officials or news organizations, it did. If Mr. Giuliani wanted to release the sealed juvenile records of an unarmed man killed by a police detective, he did. If he wanted to give a government job to a political ally's unqualified son (later indicted for defrauding the city), he did. The tough-guy approach no doubt played a role in controlling the city that once seemed ungovernable, but by the end of the Giuliani years, it had more than begun to pall.

The New York Times reported in 2004 that Bush isn't crazy about Rudy:

Republicans say that Mr. Bush felt little affection for Mr. Giuliani, and that he was particularly perplexed as the mayor allowed his personal life to unravel publicly in the spring of 2000. "There aren't a lot of people close to the president who have those kind of experiences," said the Republican close to the administration, referring to Mr. Giuliani's admissions of infidelity with the woman who became his third wife and to his bitter split from his second wife, Donna Hanover. "It's an issue of not understanding it. I've had discussions with him where he's asked, 'What's this guy all about?'"

....Although people close to the president say he likes and respects Mr. Giuliani, they say the president has long been leery of him as a man who could not be counted on for the loyalty demanded by Mr. Bush. And while the breakdown of Mr. Kerik's nomination is not lethal to Mr. Giuliani's relationship with the White House, the friends and officials say, it will hardly burnish his credentials with the president.

"It hurts him politically, so therefore by extension it's going to hurt him with the White House," said a Republican close to the administration who has worked for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Giuliani and who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of the situation. "Nobody at the White House is saying to themselves, 'Damn that Rudy Giuliani.' It's more, 'Well, he got his licks.' "

The same Times article notes Rudy's lack of people skills:

Mr. Giuliani has been repeatedly mentioned as a possibility for a cabinet position, although rarely, if ever, by anyone in the inner circle at the White House. Although the White House has noticed that Mr. Giuliani is far less combative than he was during his days at City Hall, a top administration official once noted that the former mayor would be good for any job that didn't require him to get along with people. Advisers to Mr. Bush add that as Mr. Giuliani contemplates a run for president in 2008, there is virtually no chance he will be named to a position in the administration because he would have, they say, his own agenda.

Rudy says he's for a strong military. Of course, he never served. He got a deferment for clerking for a federal judge.

Read his support for the Patriot Act, in a letter he co-signed with Ted Olsen and Joe and Victoria Toensing.

Even his war on sex shops in New York didn't last. The New York Times reported:

The former mayor's restrictions on the industry, passed in 1995 as a centerpiece of his quality-of-life campaign, proved toothless after numerous court challenges, and an intransigent industry has found a way to dodge nearly every regulation imposed upon it. While these stores still dot the western edges of Times Square, the Village, which has always prided itself on being a national symbol of tolerance, has become an example of how loopholes and weak language can undermine a once-celebrated law.

Residents and elected officials from the area estimate that 20 new sex-related stores have opened in the area in the past 18 months, and say that glaring neon confronts them along Christopher Street, Seventh Avenue South and Avenue of the Americas.

Note what the sex shops operators had to say:

Even the sex shop proprietors themselves, hectored as they may be, say they have little room to complain. "The Giuliani administration was much more zealous just over closing the places at any cost, right or wrong," said Herald Price Fahringer, a lawyer who represents many of the sex shops. "I think the Bloomberg administration is taking a much more responsible approach. They respect the law. Under Giuliani, at any one time we had pending in the courts two active cases in all five boroughs."

I'll stop now, but if you need a shorter synopsis, check out my post from August, 2004: Giuliani, Could You Just Gag?

Guiliani cleaned up the streets in New York by arresting the poor, the homeless, the squeegee cleaners, the mentally ill and the addicted. Yes, New York became cleaner, but at what price? At the price of freedom....which he now fraudulently pretends to champion. Sickening.

Rudy for President? Perish the thought.