HOOKSETT, N.H.—Would a Rudy Giuliani administration be populated with a cabinet of Republican rivals and a powerful, all-knowing vice president like Dick Cheney?
Possibly, according to musings Giuliani shared in answers to questions from New Hampshire voters Wednesday evening in Hooksett.
Asked to differentiate himself from Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war and veteran of the U.S. senate, and ahead of him in the polls, Giuliani won chuckles from the audience with his quip: "Primarily, we're two different people."
Giuliani then praised McCain as "a hero and a very good man" before going on to tout his own executive experience as the former mayor of New York. "More often than not the American people seem to prefer people with executive experience for the presidency," he said.
Later, Giuliani pivoted from a question about potential picks for secretary of state to this: "Let me answer with the question of what you would look for in a vice president first -- again without any presumption that I'm going to be the nominee."
In an answer that mentioned Cheney more than once, Giuliani said, "A vice president has to be a partner in the administration. The vice president has to know everything that's going on, just in case the vice president has to step in at a moment's notice," he said. He added that during a conversation with Cheney on Sept. 11, 2001, he felt the vice president "had a sense that he knew what he was doing."
Following his train of thought to cabinet picks, Giuliani left the door open in his administration for rivals like McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and others currently battling him for the Republican nomination.
"You could do what Abe Lincoln did," Giulani said as he referred to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on Lincoln, "Team of Rivals."
"Abraham Lincoln basically selected all of his opponents to be in his cabinet -- all his Republican opponents," Giuliani said. "Each one of them began with the idea that they were better qualified to be president than he was, and they all left realizing that they weren't, and that gives you a sense of a man of great confidence."
