Giuliani Unlikely to Drop Cigar Habit

On New York’s posh Upper East Side, Club Macanudo bustles with lively chatter and mild wafts of cigar smoke that drift among the three large rooms of the dimly lit establishment.

Within the mahogany walls of this luxury cigar lounge at Madison Avenue and 63rd Street, businessmen in their requisite collared shirts lean over paperwork on granite tables, while groups of polished 30-somethings settle in plush chairs and laugh over their $13 Macanudo Golds and $65 Cifuentes Especials. Though most patrons here are men, a few couples are enjoying wine and dessert.

For the average New Yorker, such a stilted environment might seem an odd place to mingle.

But for Rudy Giuliani (R-N.Y.) and his third wife, Judith Nathan, Club Macanudo served as the perfect backdrop that May 1999 evening, when they met. It wasn’t long before Rudy divorced his second wife, Donna Hanover, and entered a very public relationship with Nathan, who seems to revel in the high-class environment that surrounded her first meeting with the then-mayor.

That certainly wasn’t the first — or last — time Giuliani would devote an evening to smoking stogies.

Since 1999, Giuliani has faithfully attended Cigar Aficionado magazine’s annual prostate cancer benefit, and he even worked with the publication to host a cigar party for the FDNY and the NYPD after Sept. 11.

Recently, Giuliani has hosted several campaign fundraisers incorporating cigars, and, according to a report by the Center for Responsive Politics, he has collected significantly more funding from tobacco executives - a total of $60,500 - than any other candidate.

The former mayor has remained as loyal to smoking cigars as he has to touting his Sept. 11 role. He doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that cigars, with their health risks and their connotations of tough-guy elitism, might repel some voters. But how likely is it that this hobby will hurt Giuliani’s chances in 2008?

“I think that other aspects of Giuliani’s personal life and character are likely to eclipse his cigar smoking in other people’s minds,” said William Connelly, a politics professor at Washington and Lee University.

But, Connelly added, smoking might serve Giuliani well by winning over other cigar fans.

“It could be some subtle attempt to appeal to that constituency of tobacco growers, I’d imagine most of whom are Southern, who don’t usually tend to support Giuliani because he’s a New Yorker,” he said. “Micro-targeting is the wave of the future in campaigning.”

If niche targeting is his aim, Giuliani hasn’t picked a bad audience — Americans consumed over 5 billion cigars in 2006, and about 5.6 percent of Americans (13.6 million people) smoke cigars, according to a July 2007 report by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. According to the National Cancer Institute, a growing percentage of cigar smokers are young, educated males with annual incomes over $50,000 — prime, powerful voters.

Cigar smoking also might strengthen Giuliani’s image as a terrorism fighter, thanks to the hobby’s historic connotations.

“The cigar smoking lends to that man’s man, middle-aged, on-top-of-the-world, affluent cosmopolitan air that he is known for,” said Samantha von Sperling, founder and director of New York’s Polished Social Image Consultants. “He’s not some hickville governor — this is New York City, the cultural center of the world, and it takes somebody with an iron fist and big balls to run this place.”

But that tough-guy image might not be so positive in courting voters.

“It definitely does portray some power because in movies the bad guy or the big corporate guy always seems to have a cigar. But sometimes it exudes ‘jerk’ too, so you’ve got to be careful,” said Oklahoma State sophomore Benjamin Barker, co-founder of the Facebook group Cigar Aficionados.

For some voters, Giuliani’s habit may reek of elitism. After all, cigars in their earliest days were symbols of wealth.

“It is more expensive and it’s kind of an acquired taste, so it probably appeals to middle- to upper-class white males,” said Oklahoma State sophomore Barrett Brown, another co-founder of Cigar Aficionados.

“If he’s smoking some expensive brand name, that could have an elitist ring to it, but if it’s one of these Budweiser brands of cigars, that might make him seem more approachable,” Connelly said.

Giuliani’s campaign did not return a request for comment, but one could safely guess that the multi-millionaire isn’t puffing 50-cent Swisher Sweets.

Still, Giuliani deserves credit — unlike Fred Thompson, he knows better than to smoke an embargoed Cuban cigar.

And since the Bloomberg administration banned smoking in New York City public places in 2003 (cigar bars are an exception), Giuliani perhaps has been a rarity among power players by following the rules.

Still, some say Giuliani is setting a bad example that might come back to haunt him if word of his hobby spreads enough.

“I do think we’ll see more pictures of Giuliani with cigars for the reason that he seems to be holding on to his front-runner status, and front-runners invariably — as we get closer to the nominating process — suffer from outrageous media attention,” Connelly said.

To some voters, cigars will seem no more harmful than junk food, American Association of Political Consultants President Wayne Johnson noted. But others won’t be so forgiving.

“We seem to be a lot more environmentally conscious and much more health-conscious as a people, and one doesn’t have to have had a cigar to find it offensive and to think it can foul the air,” Connelly said, adding that Americans won’t be as offended by Giuliani cigars as they are by Obama’s occasional cigarettes. “But it’s irresponsible because it does set a bad example, especially if he becomes president of the United States.”

But for all the hurdles Giuliani may have to jump as a result of his cigar smoking, he’s unlikely to change his ways to please voters. In this way, his cigars may be a boon — such steadfastness confirms that this is a candidate who knows what he believes and sticks to it, for better or worse.