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The Hoover Institute, at which Reagan is an honorary fellow, thinks that Rudy is terrific and good for the Republican party:

Since taking office Giuliani has cut the crime rate in half, the murder rate by 70 percent. True, the crime rate has fallen in other cities during the same period. But it has fallen further in New York, making the city, according to FBI statistics, the safest city of more than one million inhabitants in the country. Giuliani has enacted more than $2.3 billion in tax reductions, cutting the personal income tax, the commercial rent tax, the hotel occupancy tax, and the sales tax on clothing. Giuliani has reduced New York City’s welfare rolls by half a million, a number so big that if all the people the mayor has moved off welfare established a city of their own, it would be the twenty-seventh biggest in the nation. Since Giuliani took office, New York City has created 325,000 new jobs and seen its unemployment rate drop by almost half.

If tangible accomplishments represent the measure of a politician, then Giuliani may be the most effective politician in the nation. Yet Giuliani himself is proudest of something that cannot be seen or quantified. It is the way New Yorkers think about their city.

"New Yorkers used to assume several things about the city," Giuliani said after the radio show. He slouched in an armchair across from his desk, his legs stretched out, his arms behind his head. "They assumed that it had to be dangerous, that it had to be dirty, that we were a welfare capital and we would have to stay that way, and that the city was unmanageable. That thinking is gone now."

Raised a Democrat, Giuliani explained, he became a Republican for three reasons. The first was the expansion of the welfare state. "I recognized that the alignment of the parties was changing during the 1970s, and I did not agree with the dependency philosophy that the Democratic Party was embracing, particularly in New York City. It seemed to me that the whole concept of entitlement was very, very, very destructive."

The second reason was foreign policy. "I thought that the Democratic Party, at least as represented by George McGovern and his kind of thinking, did not have an appropriate appreciation of how strong America has to be to preserve freedom and democracy," Giuliani said. "The idea that we should demilitarize, that we should underfund the military–they just didn’t recognize how dangerous the world is.

Illustration by Taylor Jones for the Hoover Digest.
"The other thing I started to feel," Giuliani said, explaining his third reason for joining the GOP, "was that the lack of political competition was killing cities. I could see that this decrepit Democratic Party, which was all that existed in cities, was able to count on everybody’s votes and not have to do anything for voters in return."

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3491481.html