Posted on 02/05/2007 5:39:13 AM PST by areafiftyone
Inching ever-closer to declaring a White House bid, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said yesterday "there's a real good chance" he's running for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Giuliani was in South Carolina - a key presidential battleground - meeting with local Republicans when he was asked whether he planned to finish exploring a possible run and official declare. "There's a real good chance," said Giuliani, who has stepped up his campaign and fund-raising stops in recent weeks. Giuliani's comments were his most succinct to date on his presidential aspirations and came as his new strategy director, Brent Seaborn, sent a letter to potential supporters boasting that the former mayor is "uniquely positioned" to win the Republican nomination for President - while acknowledging that his high poll numbers may not last. Seaborn never says Giuliani is actually running for President in the e-mail to friends and supporters, nor does he mention Giuliani's likely Republican rivals. But he says Giuliani has outpaced all GOP challengers in 11 of 13 national polls since November, as well as a half-dozen more recent polls in key states - points that seem squarely aimed at laying the groundwork for a presidential run. "Entering the 2008 primary season, Rudy Giuliani is uniquely positioned among potential Republican candidates because of his extremely high favorability ratings," Seaborn writes.
David Saltonstall
(((((PING))))
He keeps dragging this out like Chinese Water Torture. Is he hoping we will beg him to run, just to shut up the constant drivel?
Please tell me how someone who is more interested in political cronyism in the selection of such a critical, national security position - after the 9/11 attacks and during a time of war - is better on national security than any of the other candidates. Despite getting the reports about comms not working between FDNY and NYPD during the 1993 WTC attack, Giuliani didn't fix the situation and 8 years later found the city unprepared for the 2001 WTC attack. Tell me how that helps his image on national security and war fighting issues. I mean, if a glaring security and safety deficiency, exposed by an attack on us, is found in our national security or our armed forces, will it take President/Commander in Chief Giuliani 8 years to fix it if he even attempts to fix it?
Giuliani agreed to give the New York Stock Exchange a $1.1 Billion dollar handout (which, by the way, is equal to the entire operating budget of the New York Fire Department) but he could never find it in the budget to upgrade the FDNY and NYPD communications systems even after the original WTC attacks demonstrated their deficiencies. How does this demonstrate the way he will act as Commander in Chief when determining priorities for the military and homeland security?
In truth, the whole national security thing with Giuliani is purely myth. Yes, he's a war hawk. Just like almost every other Republican Presidential candidate right now except for Paul and Hagel. But his actual record on issues that directly pertain to how he would operate as President is not going to help him.
Law and Order: His law and order record does not go well beyond clearing the streets of squeegee men, bums, and hookers. Some tout his efforts to go after organized crime, but he lost all credibility on that when it was exposed that he'd appointed a corrupt high school dropout with mob ties to be the Commissioner of the New York Police Department. Bernie Kerik, again. Giuliani went on to strong arm President Bush into appointing Kerik to one of the top law enforcement positions in the country - the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Kerik had to withdraw his name when he was later indicted for his crimes for which he received an even later conviction. He avoided jail, but narrowly.
Giuliani also continued the 'sanctuary city' policies of enacted by his Democrat predecessors. He welcomed hundreds of thousands of criminals - illegal aliens - into his city and refused to work with the INS on enforcing immigration laws. In fact, so annoyed with the pressure that INS was putting on him to cooperate and uphold law and order, he actually sued the Federal Government to try to be able to just ignore the law and continue coddling hundreds of thousands of criminal aliens. His lawsuit failed, and failed again on appeal, but he flouted the law anyway and continued to coddle the hundreds of thousands of criminals in his city.
Appointments/Nominations to his administration:First, I'll start with two words. Bernie Kerik. We know what a great job Giuliani did at getting Bush to appoint his mobbed up, high school dropout, corrupt business partner Bernie Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security. Giuliani earlier appointed Kerik to head the New York Police Department And we know now how that all worked out. Kerik narrowly avoided jail, but he was convicted anyway.
Giuliani, in a quid pro quo for the New York Liberal Party's endorsement and support, appointed Liberal Party Chairwoman Fran Reiter as Deputy Mayor. He also appointed Russell Harding, the son of Giuliani's close friend Raymond Harding who also chaired the Liberal Party and was one of Giuliani's closest campaign advisers, to be the City Housing Director. Russell Harding had to leave office upon being arrested by federal law enforcement and charged with conspiracy, fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, receiving child pornography, and possesing child pornography. He was using his official credit card to pay for personal items including a car, 'Sopranos' and 'Sex in the City' DVDs, and a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon. He later pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 5 years in prison and forced to repay $367,000 he embezzled from the New York City.
Yes, Rudy Giuliani has a sterling record when it comes to appointing people to positions in his administration. One can only imagine the types of people he'd appoint to his administration and to the Supreme Court if given the opportunity. It would be wise not to give him that opportunity given his record.
Fiscal Conservatism:Rudy is no fiscal conservative. He's a big government Republican. Rudy got taxes cut $2.0 billion. But that only offset the $1.8 billion tax increase Mayor Dinkins signed off on a few years earlier. A modest $200 million tax cut. Rudy also froze the 12.5% surcharge on high income earners, but he didn't eliminate the surcharge. Nor did Rudy abolish the city income tax structure. Rudy also left NYCity saddled with a projected, pre-9/11 deficit of $2.0 billion and a $42 billion debt. Second largest behind the federal government. Rudy also added 15,000 new teachers to the city employment rolls, helping to increase the membership of two of America's largest liberal oraganizations. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Rudy also took all those savings from the cuts in welfare costs and applied them to other city welfare progarms. Really no savings whatsoever. The scope of city services wasn't reduced. In addition, Rudy almost doubled the costs of contractual outsourcing from $3.0 billion to $5.8 billion.
Fresh red meat for the crazies, eh?
And an electable one, at that.
Not since Teddy Roosevelt took on Tammany Hall a century ago has a New York politician closely linked to urban reform looked like presidential timber. But today ex–New York mayor Rudy Giuliani sits at or near the top of virtually every poll of potential 2008 presidential candidates. Already, Giuliani’s popularity has set off a “stop Rudy” movement among cultural conservatives, who object to his three marriages and his support for abortion rights, gay unions, and curbs on gun ownership. Some social conservatives even dismiss his achievement in reviving New York before 9/11. An August story on the website Right Wing News, for instance, claims that Giuliani governed Gotham from “left of center.” Similarly, conservatives have been feeding the press a misleading collection of quotations by and about Giuliani, on tax policy and school choice issues, assembled to make him look like a liberal.
But in a GOP presidential field in which cultural and religious conservatives may find something to object to in every candidate who could really get nominated (and, more important, elected), Giuliani may be the most conservative candidate on a wide range of issues. Far from being a liberal, he ran New York with a conservative’s priorities: government exists above all to keep people safe in their homes and in the streets, he said, not to redistribute income, run a welfare state, or perform social engineering. The private economy, not government, creates opportunity, he argued; government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector’s way. He denied that cities and their citizens were victims of vast forces outside their control, and he urged New Yorkers to take personal responsibility for their lives. “Over the last century, millions of people from all over the world have come to New York City,” Giuliani once observed. “They didn’t come here to be taken care of and to be dependent on city government. They came here for the freedom to take care of themselves.” It was that spirit of opportunity and can-do-ism that Giuliani tried to re-instill in New York and that he himself exemplified not only in the hours and weeks after 9/11 but in his heroic and successful effort to bring a dying city back to life.
The entrenched political culture that Giuliani faced when he became mayor was the pure embodiment of American liberalism, stretching back to the New Deal, whose public works projects had turned Gotham into a massive government-jobs program. Even during the post–World War II economic boom, New York politicians kept the New Deal’s big-government philosophy alive, with huge municipal tax increases that financed a growing public sector but drove away private-sector jobs. Later, in the mid-1960s, flamboyant mayor John Lindsay set out to make New York a poster child for the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, vastly expanding welfare rolls, giving power over the school system to black-power activists, and directing hundreds of millions of government dollars into useless and often fraudulent community-based antipoverty programs. To pay for all this, Lindsay taxed with abandon. The result: sharply increasing crime, a rising underclass inclined to languish on welfare rather than strive to uplift itself, a failing school system that emphasized racial grievance and separateness, and near-bankruptcy.
When Giuliani’s predecessor, David Dinkins, came into office—thanks to voters’ hopes that as the city’s first black mayor, he’d defuse Gotham’s intense racial tensions—he wholly embraced the War on Poverty’s core belief that the problems of the urban poor sprang from vast external forces over which neither they nor the politicians had much control. Under Dinkins, the city’s welfare rolls grew by one-third, or some 273,000 people. By 1992, with some 1.1 million New Yorkers on welfare, the city’s political leadership seemed stuck on dependency, too. Dinkins became the chief proponent of a tin-cup urbanism, constantly hounding Washington and Albany with demands and grim warnings about what would happen if they were not met.
Dinkins’s political philosophy substituted can’t-do fatalism for the can-do optimism that had made New York great. As crime spiked—there were 2,262 murders in Dinkins’s first year, compared with fewer than 600 in 1963, two years before Lindsay became mayor—Dinkins declared: “If we had a police officer on every other corner, we couldn’t stop some of the random violence that goes on,” since it resulted from poverty and racism, not poor policing.
Accordingly, Dinkins wanted to turn the police into social workers. His police commissioner, Lee Brown, believed that cops should stop reacting to crime and become neighborhood “problem solvers.” In an article on that “community policing” approach, the New York Times informed readers that such experiments in Houston and in Newark, New Jersey, were “enormously popular”—but “neither city experienced a statistical drop in crime.” Under that policing regime, New York’s already high crime rate soared, prompting the New York Post to plead, in a famous headline, dave do something.
As crime and welfare rocketed up, Dinkins decided that government should promote diversity and multiculturalism—“a gorgeous mosaic,” in his phrase. Though the performance of the city’s schools was crumbling, so that by 1992 fewer than half the pupils were reading at grade level, the board of education turned its energies to two controversies unrelated to education: it tried to adopt a “Rainbow Curriculum” geared to instilling in first-graders respect for homosexuality, and it proposed to distribute free condoms in high schools to promote safe sex among students. Although many parents objected that the board was promoting values that they did not share, Dinkins supported the board on both fiercely controversial issues.
By the time Giuliani challenged Dinkins for a second time, in 1993 (his first try had failed), the former prosecutor had fashioned a philosophy of local government based on two core conservative principles vastly at odds with New York’s political culture: that government should be accountable for delivering basic services well, and that ordinary citizens should be personally responsible for their actions and their destiny and not expect government to take care of them. Giuliani preached the need to reestablish a “civil society,” where citizens adhered to a “social contract.” “If you have a right,” he observed, “there is a duty that goes along with that right.” Later, when he became mayor, Giuliani would preach about the duties of citizenship, quoting the ancient Athenian Oath of Fealty: “We will revere and obey the city’s laws. . . . We will strive unceasingly to quicken the public sense of civic duty. Thus in all these ways we will transmit this city not only not less, but far greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”
In New York, where generations of liberal policy had produced a city in which one in seven citizens lived off government benefits, in which lawbreakers whose actions diminished everyone else’s quality of life were routinely ignored or excused, in which the rights of those who broke the law were often defended vigorously over the rights of those who adhered to it, Giuliani’s prescriptions for an urban revival based on shared civic values seemed unrealistic to some and dangerous to others. The head of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter described Giuliani’s ideas on respect for authority and the law as “frightening” and “scary.” But New Yorkers who had watched their city deteriorate were more frightened of life under an outdated and ineffective liberal agenda. Giuliani rode to victory in 1993 with heavy support from the same white ethnic Democratic voters who, nearly a decade earlier, had crossed party lines even in liberal New York to vote for Ronald Reagan.
To those of us who observed Giuliani from the beginning, it was astonishing how fully he followed through on his conservative principles once elected, no matter how much he upset elite opinion, no matter how often radical advocates took to the streets in protest, no matter how many veiled (and not so veiled) threats that incendiary figures like Al Sharpton made against him, and no matter how often the New York Times fulminated against his policies. In particular, offended by the notion that people should be treated differently and demand privileges based on the color of their skin, Giuliani was fearless in confronting racial extortionists like Sharpton. Early in his tenure, he startled the city when he refused to meet with Sharpton and other black activists after a confrontation between police and black Muslims at a Harlem mosque. And though activists claimed that Giuliani inflamed racial tensions with such actions, there were no incidents during his tenure comparable with the disgraceful Crown Heights riot under Dinkins, in which the police let blacks terrorize Orthodox Jews for several days in a Brooklyn neighborhood.
For Giuliani, the revival of New York started with securing public safety, because all other agendas were useless if citizens didn’t feel protected. “The most fundamental of civil rights is the guarantee that government can give you a reasonable degree of safety,” Giuliani said. He aimed to do so by reinstituting respect for the law. As a federal prosecutor in New York in the 1980s, he had vigorously hunted low-level drug dealers—whom other law enforcement agencies ignored—because he thought that the brazen selling of drugs on street corners cultivated disrespect for the law and encouraged criminality. “You have to . . . dispel cynicism about law enforcement by showing we treat everyone alike, whether you are a major criminal or a low-level drug pusher,” Giuliani explained.
As mayor, he instituted a “zero tolerance” approach that cracked down on quality-of-life offenses like panhandling and public urination (in a city where some streets reeked of urine), in order to restore a sense of civic order that he believed would discourage larger crimes. “Murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes,” he explained. “But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.” He linked the Dinkins era’s permissive climate, which tolerated the squeegee men (street-corner windshield cleaners who coerced drivers into giving them money at the entrances to Manhattan), to the rise of more serious crime. “The police started ignoring all kinds of offenses,” Giuliani later recounted of the Dinkins years. They “became,” he deadpanned, “highly skilled observers of crime.”
Civil rights advocates warned that Giuliani’s promise to deprive the squeegee men of their $40–100 weekly shakedown might drive them to more violent crime; in effect, they endorsed a lesser form of criminality, hoping that it would forestall more serious crime. The city’s newspapers were happy to print threats from squeegee men, like this one: “I feel like if I can’t hustle honestly, I’ve got to go back to doing what I used to do . . . robbing and stealing.” But the squeegee-men campaign provided Giuliani with his first significant victory, showing a beleaguered citizenry that government actually could bring about change for the better. Within months, the squeegee men disappeared. “A city, and especially a city like New York, should be a place of optimism,” Giuliani later explained about his policing strategies. “Quality of life is about focusing on the things that make a difference in the everyday life of all New Yorkers in order to restore this spirit of optimism.”
Giuliani changed the primary mission of the police department to preventing crime from happening rather than merely responding to it once it had occurred. His police chief, William Bratton, reorganized the NYPD, emphasizing a street-crimes unit that moved around the city, flooding high-crime areas and getting guns off the street. Bratton also changed the department’s scheduling. Crime was open for business 24 hours a day, but most detectives, including narcotics cops, had previously gone off duty at 5 pm, just as criminals were coming on duty. No more.
The department brought modern management techniques to its new mission. It began compiling a computerized database to track the city’s crime patterns and the effectiveness of the NYPD’s responses to them. That database, known as Compstat, helped police target their manpower where it was needed, and in due course it became a national model. The department drove authority down to its precinct captains and emphasized that it expected results from these top managers. Bratton replaced a third of the city’s 76 precinct commanders within a few months. “If you were to manage a bank with 76 branches every day, you would get a profit-and-loss statement from the bank,” explained Giuliani. “After a week or so, you would see branches that were going in the wrong direction, and then you would take management action to try to reverse the trend. That is precisely what is happening in the police department.”
The policing innovations led to a historic drop in crime far beyond what anyone could have imagined, with total crime down by some 64 percent during the Giuliani years, and murder (the most reliable crime statistic) down 67 percent, from 1,960 in Dinkins’s last year to 640 in Giuliani’s last year. The number of cars stolen in New York City every year plummeted by an astounding 78,000.
Criminologists tried to dismiss this achievement by arguing that the police have little influence on crime. The crime drop, they contended, was merely the fruit of an improving national economy, though the decline preceded the city’s economic rebound by several years. Others argued that New York was just riding a demographic trend, as the population of teenagers prone to break the law declined. One criminologist even suggested that Giuliani’s New York would soon see another upsurge, as a new cohort of children reached the teen years. “I don’t need a crystal ball,” the criminologist confidently predicted. Instead, crime declined relentlessly over Giuliani’s eight years, even when it rose nationally.
Critics, especially those on the left, have tried to minimize Giuliani’s accomplishment by claiming that he lowered crime by letting cops oppress black and Latino New Yorkers with brute force. As evidence, they point to unfortunate incidents such as the shootings of unarmed black immigrants Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. But the data tell a far different story: Giuliani’s NYPD managed to drive down crime while showing admirable restraint. From 1995 to 2000, civilian complaints of excessive force by the NYPD declined from one complaint per ten officers to one per 19 officers. Meanwhile, shootings by cops declined by 50 percent and were far lower under Giuliani than under Dinkins—lower in fact than in cities like San Diego and Houston, hailed for practicing community policing.
Moreover, Giuliani’s policing success was a boon to minority neighborhoods. For instance, in the city’s 34th Precinct, covering the largely Hispanic Washington Heights section of Manhattan, murders dropped from 76 in 1993, Dinkins’s last year, to only seven by Giuliani’s last year, a decline of more than 90 percent. Far from being the racist that activists claimed, Giuliani had delivered to the city’s minority neighborhoods a true form of equal protection under the law.
Giuliani’s success against crime wasn’t merely the singular achievement of a former prosecutor. He applied the same principles to social and economic policy, with equally impressive results. Long before President Bush’s “ownership” society, Giuliani described his intention to restore New York as the “entrepreneurial city,” not merely providing the climate for new job creation but also reshaping government social policy away from encouraging dependency and toward reinforcing independence.
New York had gone in the opposite direction starting in the mid-1960s, when Lindsay had drastically increased welfare rolls, believing many of the poor too disadvantaged ever to succeed and thus needing to be permanently on the dole. The Gotham welfare bureaucracy saw signing people up as its goal, while an entire industry of nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups arose to cater to and contract with the city’s vast welfare system. Budget documents from the Dinkins years projected an eventual 1.6 million people on welfare. “The City of New York was actually quite successful in achieving what it wanted to achieve, which was to encourage the maximum number of people to be on welfare,” Giuliani later explained. “If you ran a welfare office, . . . you had a bigger budget, and you had more authority, if you had more people on welfare.”
Giuliani decided to launch a welfare revolution, moving recipients from the dole to a job. Mindful that for years the city’s welfare bureaucracy had focused on signing up new recipients (Lindsay’s welfare chief had been nicknamed “Come And Get It” Ginsberg), the Giuliani administration first set out to recertify everyone in the city’s own home-relief program to eliminate fraud. In less than a year, the rolls of the program (for able-bodied adults not eligible for federal welfare programs) declined by 20 percent, as the city discovered tens of thousands of recipients who were actually employed, living outside the city, or providing false Social Security numbers.
Giuliani then instituted a work requirement for the remaining home-relief recipients, mostly men, obliging them to earn their checks by cleaning city parks and streets or doing clerical work in municipal offices for 20 hours a week. Welfare advocates vigorously objected, and one advocate pronounced the workfare program “slavery.” The New York Times editorialized that most people on home relief were incapable of work.
Giuliani persisted, and when Congress finally passed welfare reform in 1996, giving states and cities broad powers to refocus the giant, federally funded welfare program for mothers and children, Giuliani applied many of the same kinds of reforms. He hired as welfare commissioner Jason Turner, the architect of welfare reform in Wisconsin, which had led the nation in putting welfare recipients back to work. Turner promptly converted the city’s grim welfare intake offices into cheerful and optimistic job centers, where counselors advised welfare recipients on how to write a resumé and provided them with skills assessment and a space they could use to look for work.
By 1999, the number of welfare recipients finding work had risen to more than 100,000 annually, and the welfare rolls had dropped by more than 600,000. It took steadfast courage to win those gains. “The pressure on Rudy during these years was enormous,” says Richard Schwartz, a Giuliani policy advisor. “The advocates and the press trained their sights on us, just waiting for something to go wrong in these workfare programs.”
As part of Giuliani’s quintessentially conservative belief that dysfunctional behavior, not our economic system, lay at the heart of intergenerational poverty, he also spoke out against illegitimacy and the rise of fatherless families. A child born out of wedlock, he observed in one speech, was three times more likely to wind up on welfare than a child from a two-parent family. “Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without fathers,” Giuliani told the city. He insisted that the city and the nation had to reestablish the “responsibility that accompanies bringing a child into the world,” and to that end he required deadbeat fathers either to find a private-sector job or to work in the city’s workfare program as a way of contributing to their child’s upbringing. But he added that changing society’s attitude toward marriage was more important than anything government could do: “[I]f you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, . . . I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.”
As a consequence of his rejection of the time-honored New York liberal belief in congenital black victimhood, Giuliani set out to change the city’s conversation about race. He objected to affirmative action, ending Gotham’s set-aside program for minority contractors, and he rejected the idea of lowering standards for minorities. Accordingly, he ended open enrollment at the City University of New York, a 1970s policy aimed at increasing the minority population at the nation’s third-largest public college system but one that also led to a steep decline in standards and in graduation rates.
The reform of CUNY began when its chancellor complained that it was unfair to require students on welfare to work because it jeopardized their studies. Giuliani responded that it was unfair to expect middle-class kids to work their way through college by holding down jobs and going to classes while exempting students on welfare from working. While the controversy raged, several critics of CUNY pointed out that only 10 to 15 percent of CUNY students on welfare ever graduated and that the system’s overall graduation rate was abysmally low. Giuliani and Governor Pataki appointed a blue-chip panel led by former Yale president Benno Schmidt and former New York City congressman and longtime CUNY critic Herman Badillo to examine the system. The panel recommended widespread changes, including tightening admissions standards and eliminating remedial courses for students at the system’s 11 senior colleges.
The moves sparked a startling turnaround. Within a few years, CUNY was attracting 20 percent more students from New York’s elite high schools (who had previously shunned it), SAT scores of incoming freshmen had risen 168 points, and the student population reached its highest number since the mid-1970s.
Giuliani wanted to work the same dramatic reform on the city’s K–12 school system, but the entrenched educational bureaucracy and his lack of direct control over the school system stymied him. The best he could do was to use the bully pulpit as well as his influence over the two board of education members (out of a total of seven) whom he appointed. He did this so relentlessly that he ultimately pushed out two schools chancellors who wouldn’t install the reforms that he believed would spur dramatic, systemic change—reforms that included using city money for vouchers to provide low-income students in failing public schools with scholarships to private schools. He never could get his vouchers, however, and when he managed to prod the board into trying to privatize five of the city’s worst public schools, the board’s pointed lack of enthusiasm scared off necessary parental approval, and the idea died.
Although Giuliani didn’t start out as a proponent of school choice, his frustration in trying to turn around a huge school system where the teachers’ union and the bureaucrats worked to stymie reform made him into a powerful proponent of vouchers, which he believed would force the public schools to compete for students with their private counterparts. “[T]he whole notion of choice is really about more freedom for people, rather than being subjugated by a government system that says you have no choice about the education of your child,” he said.
Giuliani’s relentless attacks on the city’s educational system finally convinced most New Yorkers that it could never be salvaged unless it was under the control of a mayor responsible to voters. In 2002, the state legislature placed the city’s school system under Gotham’s mayor—too late for Giuliani.
Giuliani’s efforts to revive entrepreneurial New York naturally focused on unleashing the city’s private sector through tax cuts achieved by slowing the growth of government. Giuliani preached against New York’s lingering New Deal belief that government creates jobs, arguing that government should instead get out of the way and let the private sector work. “City government should not and cannot create jobs through government planning,” he said. “The best it can do, and what it has a responsibility to do, is to deal with its own finances first, to create a solid budgetary foundation that allows businesses to move the economy forward on the strength of their energy and ideas. After all, businesses are and have always been the backbone of New York City.”
When Giuliani took office, the city’s private sector was experiencing the worst of times. After four years under Dinkins, it had shrunk to its lowest level since 1978, losing 275,000 jobs—192,000 in 1991 alone, the largest one-year job decline that any American city had ever suffered. Not coincidentally, Gotham also had the highest overall rate of taxation of any major city and a budget that spent far more per capita than any other major city. Despite that, and despite billions of dollars in tax increases during the Dinkins years, New York could barely pay its bills, and Giuliani, immediately after taking office, faced a nearly $2.5 billion budget deficit.
Giuliani’s first budget, submitted just weeks after he took office, stunned the city’s political establishment by its fiscal conservatism. To demonstrate his disdain for the reigning orthodoxy, when the New York Times editorial board urged him to solve the budget crisis with tax and fee increases that a Dinkins-era special commission had recommended, Giuliani unceremoniously dumped a copy of the commission’s report into the garbage and derided it as “old thinking.” It was a pointed declaration that a very different set of ideas would guide his administration.
After years of tax hikes under Dinkins, Giuliani proposed making up the city’s still-huge budget deficit entirely through spending cuts and savings. Even more audaciously, he proposed a modest tax cut to signal the business community that New York was open for business, promising more tax cuts later. “I felt it was really important the first year I was mayor to cut a tax,” Giuliani later explained. “Nobody ever cut a tax before in New York City, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to set a new precedent.”
To balance the city’s budget early in his tenure, when tax revenues stagnated amid a struggling economy, the mayor played hardball, winning concessions from city workers that other mayors had failed to get. The city’s police unions had used their power in Albany to resist efforts by ex-mayors Koch and Dinkins to merge the city’s housing police and transit police into the NYPD. Giuliani strong-armed Albany leaders into agreeing to the merger, saving the city hundreds of millions in administrative costs and making the department a better crime-fighting unit, by threatening to fire every housing and transit officer and rehire each as a city cop if legislative leaders did not go along. Similarly, though the city’s garbagemen, many of whom worked only half days because their department was so overstaffed, had rebuffed the Dinkins administration’s push for productivity savings, Giuliani won $300 million in savings from them by threatening to contract out trash collection to private companies. Ultimately, with such deals, Giuliani reduced city-funded spending by 1.6 percent his first year in office, the largest overall reduction in city spending since the Depression.
Although Giuliani was no tax or economic expert when he took office, he became a tax-cut true believer when he saw how the city’s economy and targeted industries perked up at his first reductions. One of his initial budgetary moves was to cut the city’s hotel tax, which during the Dinkins administration had been the highest of any major world city. When tourism rebounded, Giuliani pointed out that the city was collecting more in taxes from a lower rate. “No one ever considered tax reductions a reasonable option,” Giuliani explained. But, he added in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Library, “targeted tax reductions spur growth. That’s why we have made obtaining targeted tax reductions a priority of every budget.” In his eight years in office, Giuliani reduced or eliminated 23 taxes, including the sales tax on some clothing purchases, the tax on commercial rents everywhere outside of Manhattan’s major business districts, and various taxes on small businesses and self-employed New Yorkers.
The national, and even world, press marveled at the spectacular success of Giuliani’s policies. The combination of a safer city and a better budget environment ignited an economic boom unlike any other on record. Construction permits increased by more than 50 percent, to 70,000 a year under Giuliani, compared with just 46,000 in Dinkins’s last year. Meanwhile, as crime plunged, New Yorkers took to the newly safe streets to go out at night to shows and restaurants, and the number of tourists soared from 24 million in the early 1990s to 38 million in 2000, the year before the 9/11 attacks. Under Giuliani, the city gained some 430,000 new jobs to reach its all-time employment peak of 3.72 million jobs in 2000, while the unemployment rate plummeted from 10.3 to 5.1 percent. Personal income earned by New Yorkers, meanwhile, soared by $100 million, or 50 percent, while the percentage of their income that they paid in taxes declined from 8.8 to 7.3 percent. During Giuliani’s second term, for virtually the only time since World War II, the city’s economy consistently grew faster than the nation’s.
Today, Americans see Giuliani as presidential material because of his leadership in the wake of the terrorist attacks, but to those of us who watched him first manage America’s biggest city when it was crime-ridden, financially shaky, and plagued by doubts about its future as employers and educated and prosperous residents fled in droves, Giuliani’s leadership on 9/11 came as no surprise. What Americans saw after the attacks is a combination of attributes that Giuliani governed with all along: the tough-mindedness that had gotten him through earlier civic crises, a no-nonsense and efficient management style, and a clarity and directness of speech that made plain what he thought needed to be done and how he would do it.
Like great wartime leaders, Giuliani displayed unflinching courage on 9/11. A minute after the first plane struck, he rushed downtown, arriving at the World Trade Center just after the second plane hit the South Tower, when it became obvious to everyone that New York was under attack. Fearing that more strikes were on the way—and without access to City Hall, the police department, or the city’s command center because of damage from the attacks—Giuliani hurried to reestablish city government, narrowly escaping death himself as the towers came down next to a temporary command post he had set up in lower Manhattan. “There is no playbook for a mayor on how to organize city government when you are standing on a street covered by dust from the city’s worst calamity,” one of his deputy mayors, Anthony Coles, later observed.
Giuliani understood that he needed not only to keep city government operating but to inspire and console as well. Within a few hours, he had reestablished New York’s government in temporary headquarters, where he led the first post-9/11 meeting with his commissioners and with a host of other New York elected officials on hand to observe, prompting even one of his harshest critics, liberal Manhattan congressman Jerrold Nadler, to marvel at the “efficiency of the meeting.” Within hours, the city launched a massive search and recovery operation. Some half a dozen times that day Giuliani went on TV, reassuring the city and then the nation with his calm, frank demeanor and his plainspoken talk. As the nation struggled to understand what had happened and President Bush made his way back to Washington, Giuliani emerged as the one public official in America who seemed to be in command on 9/11. He became, as Newsweek later called him, “our Winston Churchill.”
In the weeks following the attacks, Giuliani became both the cheerleader of New York’s efforts to pick itself up and the voice of moral outrage about the attacks. Giuliani exhorted private institutions within the city—the stock exchanges, the Broadway theaters—to resume operations and urged the rest of America and the world to come visit the city. Not waiting for federal aid, the city rapidly began a cleanup of the World Trade Center site, which proceeded ahead of schedule, and of the devastated neighborhood around the site, which reopened block by block in the weeks after the attacks. Meanwhile, the mayor led visiting heads of state on tours of the devastation, because, he said, “You can’t come here and be neutral.” He addressed the United Nations on the new war against terrorism, warning the delegates: “You’re either with civilization or with terrorists.” When a Saudi prince donated millions to relief efforts but later suggested that United States policy in the Middle East may have been partially responsible for the attacks, Giuliani returned the money, observing that there was “no moral equivalent” for the unprecedented terrorist attack. He attended dozens of funerals of emergency workers killed in the towers’ collapse, leading the city not just in remembrance but in catharsis.
As “America’s mayor,” a sobriquet he earned after 9/11, Giuliani has a unique profile as a presidential candidate. To engineer the city’s turnaround, he had to take on a government whose budget and workforce were larger than all but five or six states. (Indeed, his budget his first year as mayor was about ten times the size of the one that Bill Clinton managed in his last year as governor of Arkansas.) For more than a decade, the city has been among the biggest U.S. tourist destinations, and tens of millions of Americans have seen firsthand the dramatic changes he wrought in Gotham.
Moreover, as an expert on policing and America’s key leader on 9/11, Giuliani is an authority on today’s crucial foreign policy issue, the war on terror. In fact, as a federal prosecutor in New York, he investigated and prosecuted major terrorist cases. As mayor, he took the high moral ground in the terrorism debate in 1995, when he had an uninvited Yasser Arafat expelled from city-sponsored celebrations during the United Nations’ 50th anniversary because, in Giuliani’s eyes, Arafat was a terrorist, not a world leader. “When we’re having a party and a celebration, I would rather not have someone who has been implicated in the murders of Americans there, if I have the discretion not to have him there,” Giuliani said at the time.
These are impressive conservative credentials. And if social and religious conservatives fret about Giuliani’s more liberal social views, nevertheless, in the general election such views might make this experience-tested conservative even more electable.
Research for this article was supported by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism.
Whatever! COLTS WINS! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN!
Woo HOO!
LOL!
Hey all. Saw this and thought you should see it. Whadaya think?
“I’m pro-choice. I’m pro-gay rights,” Giuliani said. He was then asked whether he supports a ban on what critics call partial-birth abortions. “No, I have not supported that, and I don’t see my position on that changing,” he responded.
Source: CNN.com, “Inside Politics” Dec 2, 1999
He also has integrity issues.
Pro gay rights
Rudy Guiliani said that he is "seriously considering" a presidential run. Those who think that the 9/11 hero would be a formidable candidate are forgetting about the 9/10 Rudy. Meaning, this is a guy who is pro-choice on abortion, pro-gay rights and moved in with a gay couple after a messy breakup with his wife that came as he was dating another woman.
Source: 2008 Speculation by Howard Kurtz in Washington Post Jul 14, 2006
He also puts government money into homosexual pockets.
Extended all city benefits to same-sex couples
National Republicans can lump it if they don't like his new domestic-partners bill, Mayor Giuliani said yesterday. "I really haven't thought about what the impact is on Republican politics or national politics or Democratic politics," Giuliani said. The bill he submitted to the City Council would extend the benefits city agencies must grant to gay and lesbian couples. "I'm proud of it," Giuliani said of the bill. "I think it puts New York City ahead of other places in the country."
Source: New York Daily News, reprinted in 3/25/05 NY Observer May 13, 1998
Was endorsed for Mayor by the New York Liberal Party. OPPOSES IDEA OF CHRISTIAN NATION AND PRAYER/GOD IN SCHOOLS!!!! SUPPORTS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION!!! OPPOSES TUITION TAX CREDITS!!!
Some ask, How can the Liberal Party support a candidate who disagrees with the Liberal Party position on so many gut issues? But when the Liberal Party Policy Committee reviewed a list of key social issues of deep concern to progressive New Yorkers, we found that Rudy Giuliani agreed with the Liberal Party's stance on a majority of such issues. He agreed with the Liberal Party's views on affirmative action, gay rights, gun control, school prayer and tuition tax credits.
Those who are trying to destroy our liberal principles insist that an America without prayer in school is a "Godless nation".
-- Liberal Party Platform (2006)
Source: NY Liberal Party Endorsement, in 3/25/05 NY Observer Apr 8, 1989
How can we possibly nominate a candidate like this?
Source: www.issues2000.org
Good morning, A51. :^)
Rudy Giuliani has proven, both during his tenure as mayor of New York and through his subsequent rhetoric, that he is a pro-growth Republican in the mold of Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and Newt Gingrich.? As mayor, Giuliani cut?city taxes by more than eight billion dollars, reducing the tax burden on New Yorkers by 22%.? Giuliani’s low-tax views remain intact.? As Race42008 correspondent Kavon noted?yesterday, Rudy’s recent visit to Minnesota included an emphasis on achieving economic growth via low taxes and less regulation on the economy.? Rockefeller he ain’t; Rudy’s a Reagan Republican.
Rudy: Gingrich-style government reformer
Conservatives who liked Newt’s welfare reform and GWB’s attempt at entitlement reform have an ally in Rudy.? As mayor, Giuliani reformed?welfare in New York with the same tenacity as the class of ‘94 in Congress.? Once again, this ain’t Christie Whitman we’re dealing with; Rudy’s a Newt Republican who also made a serious attempt to take on the teachers’ unions in NYC and fund school choice via charter schools.? A President Giuliani means a conservative reformer who will fight for market-based revisions to our age-old bureaucratic messes in Washington.
Rudy Giuliani: Fiscal conservative
As mayor, Rudy Giuliani cut?the New York City government payroll by 19%, eliminating unnecessary civil servants?from the public dole.? Can anyone remember the last time a Republican president was able to send lazy federal workers packing?? Inheriting a multi-billion dollar deficit, Rudy turned it into a surplus, delivering eight consecutive balanced budgets.? Folks, this ain’t Linc Chafee we’re talking about here.
Giuliani: Tough enough to take on the bad guys
Unlike the Democrats, who are too nuanced to acknowledge that the “bad guys” in life even exist, Rudy Giuliani knows how to identify a threat to safety and security and pound that threat into submission.? Giuliani’s record on crime in NYC is well-documented; if Rudy?is able to do to the terrorists what he did to the crime lords of the Big Apple, Americans will once again be able to feel secure in an uncertain world.? Sure, every Republican will talk tough on terror, but only Rudy’s proven he actually knows how to eliminate a threat terrorizing a population.
Rudy will secure our borders
An essential component of national security includes securing America’s borders.? Unfortunately, President Bush has been unwilling to take the necessary steps to accomplish that task.? While John McCain and Mitt Romney discuss “comprehensive” solutions, Rudy is ready to do what it takes to prevent individuals from illegally entering the United States.? During his recent visit to Minnesota, Rudy laid out?his immigration plan, which begins with sealing the borders and also involves ensuring that immigrants learn English so that they can be better assimilated into American culture.? As such, Rudy is to the right of President Bush on this issue.
Giuliani would appoint strict constructionists to the judiciary
Social conservatives who want to see Roe v. Wade overturned and who fear the imposition of same-sex marriage on unwilling populations by judicial fiat have a friend in Giuliani.? Rudy has now explicitly voiced support?for the appointment of strict constructionists to the federal bench.? His recent trip to Minnesota included an?admission that he would appoint judges like Roberts and Alito.? During this same trip, Rudy also confirmed that he believes legislatures, and not judges, should set policy.? A Giuliani presidency would now almost certainly fail to yield judicial rulings from the federal bench in favor of gay marriage, and would be at least as likely as any other Republican presidency to see abortion returned to the political process, where it belongs.
Rudy believes that marriage is between a man and a woman
Mayor Giuliani has made clear his belief in traditional marriage only; that marriage should be defined as being between a man and a woman, and in no other form.? Says Rudy:
“I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, that it should remain that way, it should remain that way inviolate, and everything should be done to make sure that that’s the case,…”
Some social conservatives are uncomfortable that Rudy doesn’t support amending the Constitution to make sure this definition of marriage stands.? But Rudy has made clear that he’ll do whatever it takes to maintain the traditional definition of marriage; he just thinks the constitutional amendment is the wrong strategy right now.? I agree.? As long as judges like Roberts and Alito are on the bench — the type that Rudy would appoint as president — a constitutional amendment is unnecessary.
Giuliani understands the party he’s leading
Unlike McCain, who basically told southern, religious conservatives where they could go back in 2000, Rudy understands that he’s campaigning to lead the party of the sunbelt — a party that is more pro-life and pro-gun than his New York constituents.? As such, the mayor has given no indication that he will turn his presidency into some sort of pro-abortion, pro-gun control crusade, and every indication that he will defer to his base on those issues.? We’ve yet to get definitive statements from Rudy regarding abortion or the Second Amendment in the last few years.? While Rudy opponents trot out statements from the 1990s or even the 1980s on those issues, let’s wait and see where Rudy stands in 2006 before passing any judgment.? Mayor Giuliani might just surprise pro-life, pro-Second Amendment conservatives with his interpretation of how the president, and not the mayor of the most liberal city in the country, should handle these hot-button cultural issues.? At the very least, Giuliani appears prepared to do no harm to conservatives on these issues while promising to advance their causes via the appointment of conservative judges.?
Rudy Giuliani is absolutely electable
Despite what John Hawkins says, Rudy is probably the most electable Republican in the country right now.? In fact, it would be very, very difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which Rudy would lose to any Democrat, and the mayor would easily trounce the Gore/Kerry sort of Democrat that the Left insists on nominating time after time.? If Hillary or Gore is the nominee in 2008, Rudy would win the electoral college in a walk.? Here’s why.
First, the impact of an ethnic Catholic leading a presidential ticket must not be understated.? The entire industrial north is a region filled with Catholics of eastern and southern European descent.? This includes states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, which went for John Kerry by only two and three percentage points in 2004, respectively.? Identity politics alone would likely garner Giuliani a couple of extra percentage points across the Rust Belt, just as President Bush likely benefited from his southern evangelical status in states filled with southern evangelicals.
Secondly, Rudy’s fiscally-conservative profile is very similar to the Republican executives elected by the voters of states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.? By reminding upper-midwestern voters of their favorite governors, like Tommy Thompson, John Engler, and Tom Ridge, Rudy would likely garner another few points out of the Rust Belt.
So let’s say that Rudy’s ethnic Catholic, working class background, combined with his Rust Belt-style positions on the issues,?is able to increase the GOP presidential ticket’s vote share by five percent from 2004 across the Rust Belt, which includes the states bordered by Minnesota and Iowa in the west and New Jersey in the east.? The result of this sort of a swing would send the following states into the “red” column: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.? That’s another 58 electoral votes for the GOP ticket.
Now, John Hawkins will argue that’s all for naught, as Rudy, who is unable to pound the podium regarding life issues with the same tenacity as President Bush, will likely lose a few points across the South.? Okay, I’ll bite.? Let’s assume that Rudy’s?presidential ticket?loses five points from Bush’s 2004 totals in every single southern state simply because he’s a) not an evangelical, b) he can’t call himself pro-life, and c) he’s not for amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage.? I think assuming a five point loss in every southern state is more than generous to John’s argument in this case, and I suspect Hawkins would agree.? Now, let’s see how many southern states Rudy loses with that five point loss across the South…
Absolutely none.
In fact, the only state that would be teetering on the edge with a five point reduction in the South from Bush’s 2004 numbers would be Florida, a state filled with ex-New-Yorkers who would almost certainly make up for any sort of Bush-Giuliani gap in the region.? The fact of the matter is simply that the GOP has succeeded in Republicanizing the South to the extent that most southern states are simply no longer in danger of turning “blue” during a presidential election.? Mark Warner might be able to win a few of them against Arlen Specter, but as has been demonstrated above, Rudy’s no Arlen Specter.? And Hillary Clinton is no Mark Warner.
Further, Hawkins’ argument that Rudy couldn’t survive without the support of the GOP base is very true.? As such, it’s a good thing that Rudy has been able to attain the support of that very base.? Rudy generally garners between 85% and 90% of Republicans in a hypothetical matchup against a standard blue-state Democrat like Hillary Clinton.? These numbers are just ever-so-slightly shy of Bush’s 90-plus percent GOP support against Kerry in 2004.? And while it’s true that Rudy’s support among independents and Democrats will fluctuate, it’s probably also true that Rudy will at least win independents in the general election, which the president couldn’t do two years ago.? Given those considerations, it’s hard to see how Rudy can be viewed as anything other than supremely electable.
Conclusion
Of the current GOP 2008 field, Rudy Giuliani is the only candidate who brings to the table the charisma and leadership of a Reagan, the transformative conservative policies of a Gingrich, and the seriousness regarding the GWOT of a Bush.? Giuliani is perfectly suited to lead today’s sunbelt center-right GOP due to his belief in low taxes, fiscal responsibility, market-based government reform, traditional marriage, conservative judges, securing the borders, and, last but certainly not least, the destruction of the terrorist threat against America.? Only Rudy can package all of this conservatism in a manner that appeals to large numbers of swing voters while still maintaining solid levels of support among the Republican base.? Rudy Giuliani would almost certainly sweep the electoral college against any Democrat by holding all of the red states, most of which are now so heavily Republican that only a very conservative Democrat has a chance of winning them, while flipping the electoral-rich Rust Belt that has at least as much of a cultural connection with Giuliani as the South did with President Bush.? Tough, conservative, and electable, conservatives could do a lot worse than Rudy Giuliani.
Rudy Giuliani Quote (NY Post, 1996) "Most of Clinton's policies are very similar to most of mine."
Good morning! Another bright and sunny day in Freeperville. Now where is my RAID????
Well what a crowd so far that have either expressed an interest or filed exploratory or declaration forms with the FEC. There maybe others of lesser known quality. Eventunally there will be someone to satisfy everyones little corner of the party... lol.
Giuliani
McCain
Romney
Brownback
Hunter
Hagel
Tancredo
Paul
Gilmore III
Huckabee
Thompson
Gingrich [still no filing with the FEC]
Well Nader might run - so maybe he will satisfy the ones who hate Rudy. He's about their speed. He's a whiner and a crier!
Tony Snow announced he would not run yesterday
St. Rudy is crazy if he thinks that this is the truth.
Well he should know - he talks to them every day on the road.
Hillary
Whatever! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! Woo HOO!
Rudy in drag!
Whatever! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! Woo HOO!
Bush is a jerk!
Whatever! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! Woo HOO!
IMO Rudy is an RRC (Real Republican conservative) :)
He sure is!
Yep.... I saw an article where Nader said he's considering another run but would decide later on.
The FEC site says that as of December 31, 2006, 109 individuals had filed a Statement of Candidacy and/or Statement of Organization for the 2008 Presidential Election.
LOL! You know they have a cure for that - it's called a wedding! ;-)
Yeah, he appeals to Conservative Christians like the Anti- Christ.
Did it ever cross your narrow mind that he was referring to it as a negative? Frankly the Right wing of the party can't even agree on what constitutes the "pure as the wind driven snow" doctrine!
Sorry, he's a politician. He was great as the mayor of NYC, but we might as well just become Democrats and support gay marriages and march with NARAL if we're going to nominate this liberal for president.
If some people spent a fraction of the time supporting their candidate as they do making stupid, juvenile comments about Rudy, maybe their candidate would move up in the polls.
He does not support Gay Marriage but then again I can say that until I'm blue in the face and someone will still post that he does.
Actually Brian you don't have to support Rudy and we don't expect you to but don't think that FR represents any part of the Main stream voting block. If it did then Rudy would be last in the polls and Duncan Hunter would be #1.
I can't wait!
That would be true but they have no candidate, so hence they come here to bash Guiliani and all the others. Good morning, areafiftyone!
Good Morning! :-)
|
|
Giuliani | Clinton | Dem Platform | GOP Platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abortion on Demand | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Partial Birth Abortion | Supports Opposed NY ban |
Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Roe v. Wade | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Taxpayer Funded Abortions | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Embryonic Stem Cell Research | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Federal Marriage Amendment | Opposes | Opposes | Opposes Defined at state level |
Supports |
| Gay Domestic Partnership/ Civil Unions |
Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Openly Gay Military | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Defense of Marriage Act | Opposes | Opposes | Opposes | Supports |
| Amnesty for Illegal Aliens | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Special Path to Citizenship for Illegal Aliens |
Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Tough Penalties for Employers of Illegal Aliens |
Opposes | Opposes | Opposes | Supports |
| Sanctuary Cities/ Ignoring Immigration Law |
Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Protecting 2nd Amendment | Opposes |
Opposes | Opposes Supports bans |
Supports |
| Confiscating Guns | Supports Confiscated as mayor. Even bragged. |
Supports | Supports Supports bans |
Opposes |
| 'Assault' Weapons Ban | Supports | Supports | Supports | |
| Frivolous Lawsuits Against Gun Makers |
Supports Filed One Himself |
Supports | Opposes | |
| Gun Registration/Licenses | Supports | Supports | Opposes | |
| War in Afghanistan | Supports | Supports Voted for it |
Supports | Supports |
| War in Iraq | Supports | Supports Voted for it |
Supports Weak support |
Supports |
| Patriot Act | Supports | Supports Voted for it 2001 & 2006 |
Opposes | Supports |
WOW! 106??? Who are the others?
Regards, Ivan
The Conservative Case Against Rudy Giuliani
by John Hawkins
Posted Aug 30, 2006 Rudy Giuliani, a contender for the presidency in 2008, is receiving an inordinate amount of positive attention. That's quite understandable since Rudy is charismatic, did a great job on the campaign trail for President Bush in 2004, and his phenomenal performance after 9/11 was much appreciated. However, likeable or not, having Rudy as the GOP's candidate in 2008 would be a big mistake. Here's a short, but sweet primer on some of Rudy's many flaws.
Rudy's Strong Pro-Abortion Stance
As these comments from a 1989 conversation with Phil Donahue show, Rudy Giuliani is staunchly in favor of abortion:
"I've said that I'll uphold a woman's right of choice, that I will fund abortion so that a poor woman is not deprived of a right that others can exercise, and that I would oppose going back to a day in which abortions were illegal.Worse yet, Giuliani even supports partial birth abortion:
I do that in spite of my own personal reservations. I have a daughter now; if a close relative or a daughter were pregnant, I would give my personal advice, my religious and moral views ...
Donahue: Which would be to continue the pregnancy.
Giuliani: Which would be that I would help her with taking care of the baby. But if the ultimate choice of the woman - my daughter or any other woman - would be that in this particular circumstance [if she had] to have an abortion, I'd support that. I'd give my daughter the money for it."
"I'm pro-choice. I'm pro-gay rights,Giuliani said. He was then asked whether he supports a ban on what critics call partial-birth abortions. "No, I have not supported that, and I don't see my position on that changing," he responded." -- CNN.com, "Inside Politics" Dec 2, 1999It's bad enough that Rudy is so adamantly pro-abortion, but consider what that could mean when it comes time to select Supreme Court Justices. Does the description of Giuliani that you've just read make you think he's going to select an originalist like Clarence Thomas, who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade -- or does it make you think he would prefer justices like Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy who'd leave Roe v. Wade in place?
His thoughts on the gay-marriage amendment? "I don't think you should run a campaign on this issue," he told the Daily News earlier this month. "I think it would be a mistake for anybody to run a campaign on it -- the Democrats, the president, or anybody else."Here's more from the New York Daily News:
"Rudy Giuliani came out yesterday against President Bush's call for a ban on gay marriage.Although Rudy may grudgingly say he doesn't support gay marriage (and it would be political suicide for him to do otherwise), where he really stands on the issue is an open question.
The former mayor, who Vice President Cheney joked the other night is after his job, vigorously defended the President on his post-9/11 leadership but made clear he disagrees with Bush's proposal to rewrite the Constitution to outlaw gays and lesbians from tying the knot.
"I don't think it's ripe for decision at this point," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"I certainly wouldn't support [a ban] at this time," added Giuliani..."
"While McCain has taken heat for his support of comprehensive immigration reform, Rudy is every bit as pro-immigration as McCain - if not more so. On the O'Reilly Factor last week Giuliani argued for a "practical approach" to immigration and cited his efforts as Mayor of New York City to "regularize" illegal immigrants by providing them with access to city services like public education to "make their lives reasonable." Giuliani did say that "a tremendous amount of money should be put into the physical security" needed to stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming across the border, but his overall position on immigration is essentially indistinguishable from McCain's."That's bad enough. But, as Michelle Malkin has revealed, under Giuliani, New York was an illegal alien sanctuary and "America's Mayor" actually sued the federal government in an effort to keep New York City employees from having to cooperate with the INS:
"When Congress enacted immigration reform laws that forbade local governments from barring employees from cooperating with the INS, Mayor Rudy Giuliani filed suit against the feds in 1997. He was rebuffed by two lower courts, which ruled that the sanctuary order amounted to special treatment for illegal aliens and were nothing more than an unlawful effort to flaunt federal enforcement efforts against illegal aliens. In January 2000, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, but Giuliani vowed to ignore the law."If you agree with the way that Nancy Pelosi and Company deal with illegal immigration, then you'll find the way that Rudy Giuliani tackles the issue to be right down your alley.
Reagan wept.
"Actually Brian you don't have to support Rudy and we don't expect you to"
Who the hell is "we." I appreciate your understanding towards conservatives like myself that aren't fooled by a liberal in sheeps clothing.
I really don't understand how you can be so deceived/misled. Sure you can say that Rudy doesn't support gay marriage till you're blue in the face. That doesn't make it true. What did Hitler say about telling a lie long enough?
| Rudy and the Republican Nomination |
Over the last month or two there has been a good deal of public opinion polling on the 2008 Republican primary race. I thought it would be helpful to take a step back and take a closer look at how voters – particularly Republican primary voters – feel about Rudy Giuliani and why we think we are well-positioned heading in to the primary season.
Americans Have a Highly Favorable Opinion of Mayor Giuliani
Entering the 2008 primary season, Rudy Giuliani is uniquely positioned among potential Republican candidates because of his extremely high favorability ratings. Recent public opinion polling shows Mayor Giuliani with 61% approval among adults across the country – according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll (Jan. 16-19, 2007). The well respected, bipartisan Battleground Poll (Jan 8-11, 2007) shows the Mayor with 65% favorability among likely voters. More importantly, Mayor Giuliani shows an 81% favorable rating among Republicans and only 10% with an unfavorable opinion.
According to the Battleground poll, Mayor Giuliani also has surprisingly high favorability ratings beyond the base:
In an even more recent poll, Gallup (Jan. 25-28, 2007) finds Mayor Giuliani also leads among Republicans on 7 of 10 key issues including terrorism, the economy, healthcare and fighting crime. He also leads on 11 of 15 key candidate attributes – including “better understands the problems faced by ordinary Americans”, “would manage government more effectively” and what I believe to be the single most important factor – “is the stronger leader.”
In sum, while we fully expect these polls to tighten in the months and weeks to come, Republican voters genuinely know and like Rudy Giuliani.
The Mayor Performs Well in Opinion Polls
The Mayor’s exceptionally strong approval ratings also translate in to an advantage on Republican primary ballot tests. In 11 of 13 ballot tests in respected national public opinion polls [Fox News, Newsweek, Time Gallup, CNN, NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington Post] since last November, Mayor Giuliani has a lead – in fact, his lead is on average, more than 5-points over the next closest candidate. And his ballot strength began to trend upward after the 2006 midterm elections.
Mayor Giuliani Leads in Key 2008 Primary States
Mayor Giuliani also leads in a series of other states that will likely prove critical in the 2008 Republican primary:
|
State |
Mayor Giuliani |
Closest Competitor |
Source |
| California | 33% | 19% (Gingrich) | ARG - Jan. 11-17 |
| Florida | 30% | 16% (Gingrich) | ARG - Jan. 4-9 |
| Illinois | 33% | 24% (McCain) | ARG - Jan. 11-14 |
| Michigan | 34% | 24% (McCain) | ARG - Jan. 4-7 |
| Nevada | 31% | 25% (McCain) | ARG - Dec. 19-23, ‘06 |
| New Jersey | 39% | 21% (McCain) | Quinnipiac – Jan. 16-22 |
| North Carolina | 34% | 26% (McCain) | ARG - Jan. 11-15 |
| Ohio | 30% | 22% (McCain) | Quinnipiac - Jan. 23-28 |
| Pennsylvania | 35% | 25% (McCain) | ARG Jan. 4-8 |
| Texas | 28% | 26% (McCain) | Baselice Jan. 17-21 |
Mayor Giuliani’s favorable public opinion stems not only from his extraordinary leadership in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and in the uncertainty that followed, but also from a remarkably strong record of accomplishments in fighting crime and turning around New York City’s economy in the 1990’s.
Americans are anxious for fresh Republican leadership on a range of issues. Our voters are drawn to the leadership strength of a candidate during an election. Therefore, as we move forward with exploring a run for President and as we continue to share the Mayor’s story of strong leadership and Reagan-like optimism and vision, we hope to see continued growth in our foundation of support.
The New York State Liberal Party on Rudy Giuliani:
Some ask, How can the Liberal Party support a candidate who disagrees with the Liberal Party position on so many gut issues? But when the Liberal Party Policy Committee reviewed a list of key social issues of deep concern to progressive New Yorkers, we found that Rudy Giuliani agreed with the Liberal Party's stance on a majority of such issues. He agreed with the Liberal Party's views on affirmative action, gay rights, gun control, school prayer and tuition tax credits. As Mayor, Rudy Giuliani would uphold the Constitutional and legal rights to abortion.
--N.Y.S. Liberal Party Endorsement Statement of R. Giuliani for Mayor of New York City April 8, 1989
On the Republican Party:
Mr. Rockefeller represented "a tradition in the Republican Party I've worked hard to re-kindle - the Rockefeller, Javits, Lefkowitz tradition."
--Rudy Giuliani
New York Times
July 9, 1992
What kind of Republican? Is [Giuliani], for instance, a Reagan Republican? [Giuliani] pauses before answering: "I'm a Republican."
--Village Voice
January 24, 1989
On Attending 1996 Republican Convention:
Rudy even expressed his pleasure when he wasn't invited to the Republican National Convention in San Diego. "If I take three or four days off from city business, I want to do it for a substantive purpose. It didn't seem to me any substantive purpose could be served by going to the Republican convention."
--Rudy - An Investigative
Biography of Rudolph Giuliani,
Page 459, Wayne Barrett
On Barry Goldwater:
He [Giuliani] described John Kennedy as "great and brilliant." Barry Goldwater was an "incompetent, confused and sometimes idiotic man."
--New York Daily News,
May 13, 1997
On President Bill Clinton:
Shortly before his last-minute endorsement of Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election, [Giuliani] told the Post's Jack Newfield that "most of Clinton's policies are very similar to most of mine." The Daily News quoted [Giuliani] as saying that March: "Whether you talk about President Clinton, Senator Dole.... The country would be in very good hands in the hands of any of that group."
Revealing at one point that he was "open" to the idea of endorsing Clinton, he explained: "When I ran for mayor both times, '89 and '93, I promised people that I would be, if not bipartisan, at least open to the possibility of supporting Democrats."
--Rudy - An Investigative
Biography of Rudolph Giuliani,
Wayne Barrett, Page 459
Rudy Giuliani's October 1994 Endorsement of Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo:
"From my point of view as the mayor of New York City, the question that I have to ask is, ‘Who has the best chance in the next four years of successfully fighting for our interest? Who understands them, and who will make the best case for it?' Our future, our destiny is not a matter of chance. It's a matter of choice. My choice is Mario Cuomo."
--Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City
Andrew Kirtzman, Page 133
Reaction to Giuliani Endorsement of Cuomo:
"Once again, Rudolph Giuliani has demonstrated that liberalism is the foundation of his political philosophy. While Giuliani sold a bill of goods to trusting Republicans and Reagan Democrats that he had abandoned his roots as a McGovern Democrat, in his endorsement of Mario Cuomo, Mr. Liberal himself, he has shown his true colors. Giuliani's argument that Cuomo will be better for the city has a hollow ring to it. Perhaps Rudy wants a governor who will sign over a blank check to constantly bail out the city from its fiscal problems. Giuliani knows, as do all New Yorkers, that Cuomo's liberal policies have been an economic disaster for our city and state."
"But Rudy doesn't care. He has proven he will do anything to stop the election of a conservative Republican - but he won't succeed."
--Michael Long, Chairman N.Y.S. Conservative
Party Press Statement, October 25, 1994
"[Quite] frankly, you have to understand the fact that Rudy Giuliani was a McGovern Democrat, he was endorsed by the Liberal Party when he ran for Mayor. In his heart, he's a Democrat. He's paraded all over this country with Bill Clinton and, in fact, he's very comfortable with Mario Cuomo. But what Rudy Giuliani wants is to be bailed out in the city, in the mess he's in, and everybody understands very clearly in politics that they struck a deal, that Mario's going to continue to be the big spender, save Rudy the options of raising taxes by pouring money statewide into the City of New York and bailing it out. Quite frankly, I predict that he will join the Democratic Party."
--Interview with Michael Long, Chairman N.Y.S.
Conservative Party,
CNN Crossfire, October 25, 1994
On Gay Domestic-Partner Rights:
National Republicans can lump it if they don't like his new domestic-partners bill, Mayor Giuliani said yesterday.
"I really haven't thought about what the impact is on Republican politics or national politics or Democratic politics," Giuliani said.
The bill he submitted to the City Council would extend the benefits city agencies must grant to gay and lesbian couples.
"I'm proud of it," Giuliani said of the bill. "I think it puts New York City ahead of other places in the country."
--New York Daily News, May 13, 1998
On Gay-Rights\Gay Rights Bill:
Giuliani favors extended civil-rights protection for gays and lesbians. Giuliani urged, by letter, to the New York Senate Majority Leader to pass the state's first ever gay rights bill, but did it privately.
"I am writing to convey my support for the current legislation to prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians, and to urge you to allow the bill onto the floor of the Senate for prompt action."
"...It is my belief that we can penalize discrimination [against gays] without creating any potentially objectionable special privileges or preferential treatment."
--New York Post, June 5, 1993
Now Rudy Giuliani has jumped on the bandwagon, pressing the state Republican Party to release a gay-rights bill to the Senate floor for a vote. Marching in Sunday's [Gay Pride] parade, he has enlisted in the struggle to destroy the family. What a perfectly abominable springboard to seek high political office.
--Ray Kerrison
New York Post, June 30, 1993
Giuliani said homosexuality is "good and normal."
--Ray Kerrison
New York Post, July 7, 1989
On Gay Domestic Partnership:
"I have no objection to the concept of domestic partnership."
--Rudy Giuliani
Informed Sources
New York T.V. Show (PBS), May, 1992
On Abortion:
Leaflets distributed by the Giuliani campaign .... said that he opposes restrictions to Federal Medicaid financing for abortions and opposes the Hyde Amendment, which is intended to deny support for that financing.
--New York Times, June 18, 1993
"I'd give my daughter the money for it [an abortion]."
"I never called for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade."
--Rudy Giuliani
New York Newsday, September 1, 1989
As mayor, Rudy Giuliani will uphold a woman's right of choice to have an abortion. Giuliani will fund all city programs which provide abortions to insure that no woman is deprived of her right due to an inability to pay. He will oppose reductions in state funding. He will oppose making abortion illegal.
--New York Times, August 4, 1989
On Partial Birth Abortion:
Mr. Giuliani has said that New York State law should not be changed to outlaw the procedure.
-- New York Times, January 7, 1998
On School Choice:
"I wanted to know if he supports tuition tax credits and vouchers, which he doesn't."
--Sandra Feldman, President of N.Y.C.
Teacher's Union, 1993
On Taxes:
[Giuliani] says ruling out a tax increase is "political pandering."
--Newsday, August 31, 1989
Reagan wept.
Well, in all fairness, she did say "IMO" which in this case is totally worthless.
Now now - no need to get snippy! LOL!
Whatever! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN! Woo HOO!
Some have even said they would support Hillary over Rudy. As far as I'm concerned, that kind of says it all.
Rudy's a whole lot closer politically to Ralph than his critics are.
Indeed. That's like wearing a sign saying, "I'm an idiot", particularly after Hillary wants to confisicate the wealth of oil companies and promised to end the Iraq war upon achieving office, regardless of circumstances.
Regards, Ivan
Wrong. Read Pat Buchanan's fawning interview of Nader.
Regards, Ivan
LOL! Now that is a true Leftist who can say that! LOL!
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