Free Republic

Rudy Giuliani's announcement that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination brings to my mind a book I wrote in the early 1990s, "The Conservative Crack-Up." When I wrote the book, Ronald Reagan's successor, President George H. W. Bush, was ignoring many of the constituent ingredients of the Reagan Revolution, for instance, tax cuts. The various factions of the conservative coalition were disgruntled and threatening to take a walk. Once again liberal pundits were diagnosing the conservative movement as moribund. Ever since the conservative movement's ascendancy within the Republican Party in 1964, these grim diagnoses have been handed down episodically....

Rudy Giuliani will prevent a conservative crack-up. Today, after very little effort, Giuliani is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Dick Morris is predicting a Giuliani vs. Clinton race in 2008. Yet some conservatives are dubious of the man who cleaned up New York, returned it to a vigor unimaginable from the 1960s through the 1980s, and then led New York and the country heroically through 9/11. Well, one knows a politician by the company he keeps, and Giuliani has around him the financial people who created the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute. He relied heavily on the Institute's policies while governing...