Rudy Wrangles Big Name Team for '08

It's been a busy week on the organization front, and now some big money names are coming out strong for Rudy, including Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, former California candidate Bill Simon, and South Carolina's Barry Wynn. The New York Times sums up Rudy's first finance committee meeting yesterday:

Among those who attended were Thomas O. Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers; Mel M. Immergut, chairman of the New York law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; Patrick C. Oxford, managing partner at the Houston law firm Mr. Giuliani joined last year, now known as Bracewell & Giuliani; William E. Simon Jr., an investor who ran for governor of California in 2002; and Barry D. Wynn, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. T. Boone Pickens, a Texas billionaire with oil and gas investments, took part through a conference call, Mr. Bailey said.

Several of the supporters, including Mr. Hicks and Mr. Wynn, were major contributors to President Bush’s re-election effort in 2004.

Mr. Immergut said he did not have doubts about Mr. Giuliani’s interest in the race. “If he wasn’t really interested, he wouldn’t be spending the time of all the people that are already gathered around him and the amount of time that he’s been spending crisscrossing the country to test the waters.”

And check this out:

“Certainly one of the first questions that was asked was how his views on things like gun control and pro-choice and gay marriage would affect the views of the party in terms of nominating him,” Mr. Immergut said.

“He talked specifically about what his views on those issues were, and he said that his own view was that when he was able to engage in conversations with party members who were more on the right, they could understand that his views were not as black and white as they had been painted.”

In the Washington Post, former Texas GOP finance chair Roy Bailey says that events around the country may start as soon as 30 days from now:

Bailey refused to disclose the finance committee's fundraising goals, but said the group was putting together a schedule of events around the country to begin in the next 30 days.

Bailey described Giuliani as "very serious" about the presidential exploratory effort, and said the success of the fundraising campaign will be an important gauge of whether the former mayor can raise the money he needs to go forward.

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