Know your audience, Giuliani learns

By Sasha Issenberg, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- This morning, Rudy Giuliani repeatedly invoked Ronald Reagan -- as he often does –- as a model for the type of Republican he'd like to be as president.

But before the Republican Jewish Coalition's candidates forum, Giuliani offered a new creation myth to illuminate his Gipper worship: "I know the moment Ronald Reagan would be president of the United States. I was at a bar mitzvah in Manhattan…"

Giuliani went to explain that he was surprised when everyone at his table said they were voting for Reagan (one assumes this is 1980). "This was in New York!" Giuliani explained with a combination of awe and disgust, creating the perfect trifecta for the crowd: a celebration of Reagan, a sweet bar mitzvah memory, and a hint of his love-hate relationship with the New York Democrats who elected him twice as New York's mayor.

Another portion of Giuliani's remarks probably didn't go over as well.

While praising Reagan's blunt description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Giuliani went out of his way to note that "Communist China" deserved the same epithet.

The man who was sitting immediately to Giuliani's left as he said this -– Sheldon Adelson, a major fund-raiser who sits on the RJC's board and who minutes earlier had given a flattering introduction to Giuliani -- was someone who'd would probably be happy to stay as far from China-bashing as he could at the moment.

When Adelson is not collecting checks for Giuliani, he's CEO of the Las Vegas Sands, which this summer opened two casinos in Macau, including the world's largest, the Venetian. Perhaps the biggest hurdle facing casino operators in Macau, a special administrative region of China, is ensuring that Beijing relaxes restrictions on the movement of gamblers (and their money) from the mainland.