Why Is Rudy Smiling?

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I tossed out $30 million, a lot of money for anyone's campaign, a Hillary Rodham Clinton sort of number.

"I'm not going to predict it," Giuliani parries. "We're going to do the best we can."

Not exactly an answer, but it was interesting that he didn't bat an eye.

One of the country's most influential Republicans, reluctant to dive publicly into the murky pool, tells me he has upgraded Giuliani from not a chance to ... maybe. "Once you get to be John Wayne, it's awful hard for the other guys to make you into Pee-wee Herman."

No one has ever gone from being a mayor to being President without holding an office in between. Giuliani passed up a chance to run for the Senate in 2000; instead, the years since he left city hall have turned into an experiment in information-age politics. Rather than build his résumé, he has been building his brand.

While most former mayors might harbor a hope of seeing their names on a city park or freeway bridge, Giuliani has stamped his on a consulting firm, an investment bank, a best-selling book and a venerable Texas law firm. Through his speeches and business deals, he has expanded his political network and piled up chits for future favors — all while making himself rich. Who needs the Senate?

Marketed in boardrooms, convention centers, basketball arenas and political rallies, the name Giuliani (pronounced ka-ching!) has been used to sell concepts like public safety, the repair of bankrupt companies and the ability, as Kipling put it, to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. In a word, the Giuliani brand stands for leadership: the one-word title of his book and the mantra of his staff members.

Cashing in while gearing up — few politicians have the name recognition to pull it off, but after watching Giuliani, more of them may try it. The strategy germinated even before 9/11, as the lame-duck mayor hatched plans to start a consulting business, Giuliani Partners, with some of the leading figures from his administration. Their cachet would come from the renaissance of New York City during the Giuliani years: crime and welfare rolls down sharply, quality of life and overall snazziness trending up.

Then al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center. New York City's worst catastrophe was Giuliani's finest hour, and the worldwide acclaim he received gave his start-up company instant momentum. Firms lined up to buy the advice, credibility and connections of a man who had been knighted (honorary) by the Queen of England, hailed as "Rudy the Rock" by the President of France and chosen as TIME's Person of the Year.

For the most part, the founders of Giuliani Partners were as New York as breakfast at Barney Greengrass. One man stood out: Roy Bailey. He wasn't part of the city's revival or linked to its gutsy endurance. Bailey was a Texan, a Republican moneyman and a former finance chairman of the Texas G.O.P. and was therefore intimately familiar with the inner workings and deep pockets of the most awesome fund-raising operation in political history, the Bush network.

In other words, because of his strong brand, Giuliani didn't have to go on bended knee, like an ordinary politician, to the man who was to become his campaign-finance chairman. Instead, weaving a web of potential major donors became just another enterprise of Giuliani Partners. With one hand, the firm signed contracts to advise such security-conscious businesses as Entergy (a leading U.S. nuclear power plant operator) and Broadwater Energy (which hopes to build a liquefied-natural-gas terminal in New York's Long Island Sound). With the other hand, the company began reaching out to such key Bush supporters as oilman T. Boone Pickens, investor Thomas Hicks and the Bass family.

There have been missteps. Giuliani's push to have former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik of Giuliani Partners nominated for Secretary of Homeland Security was a fiasco. Investigators quickly turned up some undisclosed financial favors done for Kerik by a company seeking municipal contracts. But in general, business and politics have meshed so smoothly inside Rudy Inc. that at times you can't tell them apart.

Consider, for example, the transformation of Brooklyn-bred Rudy into an honorary Texas oil lawyer. From the start of their private-sector days, Giuliani and his associates were intent on joining a law firm in addition to running their consulting business. It made sense: before he was mayor, Giuliani was a senior official in the Reagan-era Justice Department. His subsequent flashy tenure as U.S. attorney in New York launched his political career. As he explained in an interview with a Texas newspaper last year, "About three-quarters of the people in Giuliani Partners are lawyers, and we always wanted to practice law."

As it happened, Bailey had a friend in Texas named Patrick Oxford, managing partner of an old Houston law firm called Bracewell & Patterson. And Oxford had a problem. He could see that the future was bleak for regional law firms in a globalizing economy. Expanding the firm, especially into Manhattan, had become a matter of life and death, Oxford later recalled.