Maybe Joe Biden was right after all.

Speaking during the Oct. 31 Democratic debate on MSNBC, Biden called Rudy Giuliani "probably the most under-qualified person since George Bush to seek the presidency." "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence," said the Delaware senator. "A noun, and a verb and 9/11."

Now, after a few months of expanding his vocabulary, Giuliani is going back to his old grammar. In an ad set to start airing Friday in Florida and New Hampshire and--in a highly unorthodox primary-season move--nationally on FOX News, Giuliani will "reintroduce" himself to the American public by--you guessed it--revisiting that dark day.

In case that wasn't clear from the title, "Freedom," "September" is the third word out of Rudy's mouth; the fourth is "11th." "When you challenge Americans, there's no country that stands up stronger and better than the United States of America," he says, gravely intoning the name of our nation twice in a single line. Not patriotic enough for you? How about slow-motion images of Old Glory rippling in the breeze? Bingo. Giuliani has squeezed in six shots of the stars-and-stripes--or one every ten seconds (plus random pics of the moon landing, a rocket ship and Olympic runners, for variety). And the larger point--Greatest Generation, great; firefighters, great; Americans, great; terrorists, bad--is the sort of thing even people opposed to apple pie can agree with.

This doesn't bode well for Rudy's bid. If it was, say, May, I'd be all for Giuliani playing the Sept. 11 card. Fair game. But at this point, he's been there, done that. With only a week to go before the first nominating contest, a spot like "Freedom" fairly reeks of desperation. Sept. 11 was Giuliani's opening argument--his foot in the door. The plan was to build on his resonant but not particularly substantive post-Sept. 11 rep as "America's Mayor" by stressing his pre-Sept.10 record as the tax-cutting, crime-busting bulldog who rescued New York. But when people started paying attention, his poll numbers plummeted. Giuliani has long trailed in the first four early states, but now that his leads in Florida (3 points) and nationally (2 points) are well within the margin of error, his Feb. 5 strategy--lose early, then win big--is looking increasingly unlikely. Which means, it seems, that Giuliani's back where he started--resorting to rippling flags, stock footage of soldiers, fear-mongering invocations of freedom-hating Islamists and flagrant ass-kissing appeals to the "brave," "courageous," "persistent" American people to remind everyone that he was there. Not that he, you know, did anything.

Giuliani has results to run on. But as he puts it in the ad, "I saw the picture of the firefighters putting the flag up at ground zero."

As I said: maybe Biden was right.

UPDATE, 10:30 a.m.: The decision to air "Freedom" was made before the assassination today of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. As I noted above, the ad wasn't a political risk--no one disagrees with patriotism. But I doubted that it would help Giuliani overcome his slide in the polls. Has that changed? Of course, if Bhutto's death refocuses the media (and voters) on the terrorist threat, that benefits Giuliani. But that would've happened with or without the spot. "Freedom" merely emphasizes a connection voters would've made on their own.