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Dear NCLaw441,

"Would you vote for Hillary, or essentially do so by not voting at all, if Giuliani were to be the candidate?"

No, I wouldn't vote for Mrs. Clinton. However, not voting for Mr. Giuliani is not the same as voting for Mrs. Clinton. It is not voting for Mr. Giuliani. In terms of the actual arithmetic of an election, although failing to vote for Mr. Giuliani would aid Mrs. Clinton, it wouldn't assist her as much as an actual vote for Mrs. Clinton.

However, that really all misses the point. The point is that if Mr. Giuliani is nominated by the Republican Party, a significant portion of the Republican coalition will be effectively disenfranchised in that the two candidates will be virtually indistinguishable on the issues that matter most to social conservatives. We will have already lost the election.

It would be different if the party wished to nominate someone who wasn't especially good on the primary social conservative issues. Someone like Sen. Allen, who appears to be in favor of overturning Roe, but who is not really all that pro-life, or someone like Sen. McCain, who may not be entirely sincere about our issues, would be acceptable, at least to me. We'd be getting a half loaf, or at least some significant part of the loaf that mattered to us. That's called compromise, settling for someone who isn't ideal, but who gives you some of what you want.

In Mr. Giuliani, however, we have the ideal candidate to drive away social conservatives. He's pro-abortion, including pro-partial birth abortion, pro-government-paid abortion, etc. He's pro-homosexual marriage, pro-homosexual adoption. He's very anti-RBKA (an important matter to many social conservatives). Furthermore, he's shown antipathy to other parts of the conservative platform, especially tax cuts. He loudly endorsed Mr. Cuomo over Mr. Pataki, and that's at a time when Mr. Pataki was behaving like a genuine budget-cutting conservative.

With Mr. Giuliani, we social conservatives not only don't get a half loaf, or even a slice, but not even a crumb. And we can hardly console ourselves that at least he's on board with the rest of the conservative agenda. With Mr. Giuliani, we essentially get someone who is a thorough-going liberal on every issue except the war.

I'm sorry, that's just not enough for my vote. If the rest of the party insists on a candidate that is absolutely unacceptable to a large group belonging to the party's coalition, then the party must expect to lose a significant percentage of that group.

sitetest

I agree wholeheartedly with sitetest's post. You do, however, raise the very difficult question of what to do if the choice is Giuliani vs. Hillary. Does one go against core beliefs by voting for Giuliani in order to prevent the far worse result of President Hillary Clinton? Or is it better to let one election go, even to Hillary Clinton, in the hope of advancing your principles over the long haul? I do wrestle with that question. The problem I have in voting for Giuliani is that I think it very much weakens social conservative positions long term by showing that you can be socially liberal and still get the conservative vote (if your opponent is even further left). Of course, Hillary Clinton as President is nearly unthinkable.

It's a tough issue. I'm not trying to debate Giuliani's strengths and weaknesses here, just trying to figure out what is the principled course of action for those voters who find his social views abhorrent. Do we vote for him on the theory that he's still better than Hillary? Or do we not vote, on the theory that even defeating Hillary Clinton does not justify the long term damage that a Giuliani victory would inflict on our beliefs? It is a difficult decision. I don't think, however, that it is going to come to that point. I just don't see Giuliani as the nominee. Of course, I also insisted that New York voters would see through Hillary Clinton, that she could never win a Senate seat... so what do I know!