This is the “goomah” issue. Rudy has expressed his belief to at least one prospective groom of my acquaintance that marriage is improved by a goomah (as rendered in The Sopranos)—the Italian-American dialect word for a significant other woman. His grandfather had had a goomah, Rudy said, with some sensitivity and depth of feeling, and his father had one, and what worked worked.

Rudy, arguably, is the most anti-family-values candidate in the race (this or any other). And yet, in some sense—which could be playing well with the right wing—what he may be doing is going to the deeper meaning of family values, which is about male prerogative, an older, stubborn, my-way-or-the-highway, when-men-were-men, don’t-tread-on-me kind of thing.

And then there are Rudy’s people. Rudy has always been surrounded by concentric and sometimes intersecting circles of reasonable and professional people and greater and lesser inappropriate types. It is, however, in a way that has limited many local politicians trying to go national, the inappropriate ones that dominate his mind share, staffers who have tended him so long and enabled him so well—“Rudy doesn’t really get along with outsiders” is how it’s gently put—that they are, in their fashion, crazy, too.

“I know,” says an aide in one of the outside circles, “how meshugge they are or worse. Meshugge is a friendly, loving word—some of them are way beyond meshugge.”

There’s a game that’s played by staffers from the more or less reasonable and professional circles, about who might or might not get White House jobs. The game breaks everybody up.

Rudy’s closest adviser, Peter Powers, whom handicappers mark as White House chief of staff, is a grade-school friend. Then there’s Denny Young, often called the consigliere in the Rudy camp in a partly ironic and partly proud identification with Mafia lore. (Powers’s and Young’s marriages both broke up shortly after Rudy ended his.) Next in line is Tony Carbonetti, the son of one of Rudy’s schoolhood chums, who has spent his entire career with Rudy, as aide and operative. “He’ll be Karl Rove, which he isn’t, but that’s how Rudy will treat him,” says a longtime Rudy adviser.

Then Sunny Mindel, his famously intemperate spokeswoman: she’s been relieved of that job in his campaign—she still holds it for the Giuliani business—but is expected to get it back in the White House. No one in any circle has ever quite been able to explain Sunny—except to say that her hysteria matches Rudy’s own, that together they do the things that make for rare, and peculiar, political media, which is Rudy’s sweet spot. (She’s credited with getting Rudy to go to war with the Brooklyn Museum of Art.)

The punch line (this is where everybody breaks up) to the Giuliani White House organization chart is that the intern will be Cristyne Lategano.

Except that now there is an even better East Wing joke. Rudy people tend, when they speak of the prospective First Lady, to use an exclamation point: Judi! (as they often use the exclamation point for Rudy!). Other than to hope that her unlikeliness somehow reinforces the idea of Rudy’s Everyman authenticity, there is no real way that anybody can seem to rationalize Judi, the nurse whom he may or may not have met in a cigar bar (they did often, as the New York Post says, “rendezvous” at Cigars & Bar on West 58th Street in Manhattan). Even among Rudy’s staunchest people, she’s seen as the most likely implosion point. It is not just her hidden first marriage (“Rudy and Judi’s wedding wasn’t a small wedding,” one aide notes. “This was, in New York terms, a royal wedding. There were thousands of stories written about it—and she didn’t think she ought to correct her marital statistics?”), the dead dogs (in the late 1970s she worked for a surgical company that demonstrated its medical staplers on live dogs, which were cut open and stapled shut, pretty much killing them), her voluble discussion of how much money she’s spending on her clothes and on the redecoration of their new house (“She’s spending him dry,” says an aide), the open war with his children (she is said to control access to Rudy), and now her hope to join in on Cabinet discussions (and his apparent hope to have her), but, most problematically, the fact that her interest in publicity is as great as his. “Definitely she’d be up there with Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton as a First Lady who redefined the job—major redefinition” is the punch line.