Yesterday, we held a little exercise to try to see how many other times in US history an elected official has tried to extend his stay in power beyond his legally sanctioned term of office. It turned out to be an interesting historical exercise beside our attempt to see how many precedents there were to Rudy Giuliani's attempt to stay in office as mayor on an emergency basis after 9/11. We found out about a few cases where unresolved election disputes led to an incumbent trying to remain in office until the controversy was resolved. There was a Reconstruction Era governor of Texas who tried to stay in office after losing a disputed election. There have been numerous cases of incumbents trying to remove term limit laws blocking them from another run for office. But that strikes me as an entirely different matter -- myopic and power-hungry perhaps, but there's nothing wrong with changing a law as long as it's done in the proper way.

To remind everyone, not long after 9/11, as Rudy's term of office was coming to an end, he suggested and briefly pushed for being allowed to remain in office past his term on the argument that in the aftermath of 9/11 his leadership was indispensable and that the new mayor would perhaps have a period of apprenticeship under Rudy to come up to speed on running the city.

What it all comes down to is that I'm not sure there's any example of an elected official simply trying to extend his term of office beyond the legally-sanctioned period on the basis of an alleged emergency simply on the argument that he's indispensable, as Rudy did just after 9/11.

I remember thinking at the time that that was the moment when post-9/11 Rudy really jumped the now-proverbial shark. Rudy, you remember, had been set to leave office a pretty unpopular mayor. He'd just had cancer, dropped out of the senate race, was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. 9/11, for once the phrase makes sense, changed everything. People who'd never liked him credited him for inspiring leadership in the hours and days after 9/11. But he just couldn't bow out with grace. He had to try to stay in office longer. Even in his moment of greatest triumph, he couldn't resist being who he was.

Little has been made or remembered about this little coda to the Rudy 911 glory myth. But when judging how faithful a custodian he'll be of the rule of law and the constitution, I think this little chapter is a telling one.