Rudy or Dr. Phil?

Well, knock me over with a feather. I thought Barack Obama was going to be the feel-good candidate. But get a load of Rudy:

[In New Hampshire] Rudy Giuliani was telling a roomful of voters about a dream he had three times, when he interrupted himself. “Any psychiatrists here? Want me to lay down and tell you this? You do dream analysis, right?”

Minutes later the former New York mayor had moved on to the “fear of abandonment” his city suffered after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, his people’s need to be “embraced,” and America’s need to buck up because “when you concentrate on your problems so much, as a person or as a society, you sometimes lose perspective.”

Most of my fellow New Yorkers in the cohort—those who don’t scoff at the notion that he might actually get the Republican nomination, much less win an election against Hillary Clinton—are terrified of his authoritarian streak and his provocatively hectoring ways. Me, not so much. What drives me mad is his relentless, shameless, credit-seeking self-promotion; his jack-in-the-box ability to be right smack in the middle of every gathering of cameras and microphones in a 50-mile radius of City Hall; and his testy, prickly need to respond to every culture-war flare-up with a fusillade of insulting verbiage.

But Rudy 2.0 seems to be stickier than our Rudy.

On a trip [to New Hampshire] last week, Giuliani, 63, was thanked time and again for his leadership after the 9/11 attacks and almost as often for making New York a livable city. Those are the pillars of his candidacy, and he promotes them to the hilt.

Can you believe that we New Yorkers are going to get the celebrity smackdown we were so cruelly denied in the summer of 2000? If it weren’t downright tragic, it would be a hoot.