FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Flailing around Florida, Rudolph Giuliani is getting different results, just not the ones he wants. Call him a lot a things – weird, imperious, self-aggrandizing – but crazy he is not, at least by Einstein’s notion.

For 50 days, Giuliani has had the Sunshine State nearly to himself. In advance of the presidential primary on Jan. 29, he’s sucked up to the Cuban vote in Miami, pandered in Cape Canaveral about the space program, tried to scare retirees over early-bird specials in South Florida.

There he is riding in a fire truck in a Miami parade, trailed by angry firefighters who blame him for multiple failures when New York was attacked. There he is in the Panhandle, the consummate Yankees fan trying to look down-home on the Redneck Riviera. And every night, his campaign phone bank reaches out to the diaspora of 1.5 million transplanted New Yorkers. Start spreading the news – quick!

Yet, the more they see of him here, the more his poll numbers tank. Even with ol’ Fred Thompson shuffling off the stage for a life of longer naps and witless homilies to more appreciative audiences, Rudy’s campaign is in a meltdown.

It’s worth stepping back for a moment to recall how far and how quickly Giuliani has fallen. For most of the summer and well into the fall, he was the Republican frontrunner. His campaign consisted of a hagiography: the hero of 9/11. His fundraising was strong. Now the campaign is all but broke and he’s getting his clock cleaned in some states by Ron Paul – Ron Paul! – the 97-pound libertarian who thinks the war on terror is bogus.

What happened? I saw Giuliani four years ago at a rally in Henderson, Nev. He was on fire, the Elvis of Republicans. George W. Bush was the president who said things like, “You’re working hard to put food on your family.” By contrast, people emerged from that Giuliani speech in Nevada saying, “I wish he were running.”

Based on dozens of conversations I’ve had with Republican voters, who’ve been casting real ballots here since January 14, when early voting started, it seems Giuliani is not familiar with the advice that wise coaches give their better players: Don’t believe your press clips.

And it’s amazing how much voters bring up his tawdry personal life. They laugh about Rudy in drag and Rudy during his Frasier Crane period, when he lived with a gay couple and sipped late-night brandy while expostulating over the decline of good opera. It’s harmless.

But this is a state of full of mothers who live for phone calls from long-distance adult children, and there’s one thing they can’t abide – Rudy’s wreck of a family life. Yes, people roll their eyes over the story of how Giuliani’s third wife picked him up in a cigar bar while he was still married to the second Mrs. Hizzoner. But I heard no end of condemnation over the mayor’s estrangement from his two children.

More broadly, you can summarize Giuliani’s problems in the line he no longer uses. When the World Trade Center towers came down, he turned to his loyal sidekick Bernie Kerik, and said he was glad George Bush was president.

Now, that line is a triple loser. Kerik, his police commissioner, is under federal indictment, in a sea of troubles. Bush is despised by two-thirds of Americans, and even a majority of Republicans want to go in a different direction. As for the big scare, give Senator Joe Biden credit for writing what may be Giuliani’s obit: “There are only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.”

Yet Giuliani still wants to frighten people into voting for him. Maybe that’s why he hired the gothic-faced actor Jon Voight to stump for him in Florida. What, Christopher Walken wasn’t available?

Win by narrative, die by narrative. His other selling point was how he turned New York around. He deserves credit, of course, for many improvements in the city. But as crime plummeted in New York, the same thing has happened in cities across the country. Los Angeles last year had the lowest number of homicides in nearly four decades. Seattle just posted its lowest crime rate in two generations.

And as Michael Powell and Russ Buettner documented in a remarkable piece in the Times earlier this week, Giuliani ruled by crushing anyone who dared to cross him. There’s a reason Ed Koch’s book on his fellow mayor was called “Giuliani: Nasty Man.”

In the glory days of the Giuliani campaign – say, before he started taking cell-phone calls from his wife in the middle of speeches – the mayor was full of cartoon bluster. He said he would not hesitate to hit Iran, hard and fast. He talked about victory in Iraq, hard and fast. That was his message, and he had plenty of money to spread it. He spent more than anyone but Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, and finished a distant fourth.

Giuliani may still eke out a win in Florida. He is promising Floridians good insurance rates for hurricane coverage – O.K., a niche message of the Geico school, but that’s what he’s down to. Or as the mayor says, with only a hint of the swagger that brought him here: “It’s playing out the way we thought it would play out.”