Will Rudy Be as Bulletproof as Bill Clinton?

As the year began, the Giuliani campaign seemed doomed by its own lost playbook, which listed his liabilities in bullet form: his third marriage after publicly cheating on his second wife; his consulting business with a less-than-sterling partner, Bernard Kerik; his liberal positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control, to say nothing of a New York style that might not charm red-states residents.

Yet here he is at year's end leading in the polls, the cross-dresser darling of the Religious right, with even the redoubtable Frank Rich in his Sunday Times column reduced to citing Judith Regan as the "silver bullet" that might pierce the heart of his campaign.

Not likely. More and more, Rudy is resembling the Bill Clinton of 1992, who (with an assist from you-know-who) survived his Gennifer Flowers scandal and went on to overcome stories of smoking marijuana ("I didn't inhale") and dodging service in Vietnam.

Now, as Hillary Clinton takes flak for not making her First Lady papers public fast enough, Giuliani is skating past complaints about moving 2,100 boxes of documents from his tenure as mayor to his own tax-exempt foundation before turning them back to the city. Only the mildest of questions has been raised about the papers, which include 9/11 records, being "sanitized" for campaign purposes.

After a media makeover, the current Mrs. Giuliani has emerged to make her first political speech, to an audience of cancer advocates, describing her not-then husband's reaction to hearing the news about his own in 2000.

The campaign's Southern strategy has worked well enough to bring Pat Robertson on board, even after having to dump Louisiana Sen. David Vitter of D.C. Madam fame and a South Carolina chairman accused of dealing cocaine.

After all this and more mishaps, any Judith Regan revelations from her pillow talk with Kerik and about the Murdoch empire's attempts to protect America's Mayor from gossip seem unlikely to derail him.

Only Mitt Romney's money and Iowa voters' orneriness might slow Rudy down. But then again, he could take heart from Bill Clinton's 1992 pattern, when the "Comeback Kid" bypassed Iowa and lost in New Hampshire but still went on to run the table of later primaries and get the nomination.

If the Giuliani campaign needs money, they might want to consider auctioning off signed copies of that lost playbook to die-hard supporters who have faith Rudy will prove it wrong.

Giuliani, Murdoch and Judith Regan

She is making news again, this time claiming Rupert Murdoch's people asked her to cover up an affair with Bernard Kerik to protect Rudy Giuliani's presidential ambitions. It's vintage Judith Regan to tie her own interests, this time in a lawsuit against Murdoch, to the headlines.

The charge comes at the start of a 70-page filing for $100 million in damages for what she says was a campaign to smear and discredit her by her bosses at Harper Collins and its parent company, News Corporation.

Before she was famous, Regan sounded me out about writing a book about fatherhood. When I started talking about the complexity of the subject, she cut me off.

"No, no," she said, alluding to her own experience. "It has to be about bastards abandoning their children. The title is 'DaddyWho?'"

After that brief encounter, Regan parlayed her colorful certainty into a notorious career as a book publisher and TV host, most of it under the aegis of Murdoch, a kindred spirit when it comes to eschewing ambivalence.

Now here they are, locked in combat, after Murdoch fired her over O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It" book, which he had apparently approved but backed off when it provoked widespread outrage.

Regan, the New York Times reports, "had an affair with Mr. Kerik, who is married, beginning in the spring of 2001, when her imprint, Regan Books, began work on his memoir, 'The Lost Son.' In December 2004, after the relationship had ended and shortly after Mr. Kerik’s homeland security nomination fell apart, newspapers reported that the two had carried on the affair at an apartment near ground zero that had been donated as a haven for rescue and recovery workers."

Regan has an unerring flair for getting attention and perfect pitch for bad taste. It's a wonder Murdoch ever let her go.