Posted on 02/15/2007 10:12:09 AM PST by meg88
Pundits of all political persuasions have been chattering about whether Rudy Giuliani, whose name is invariably modified by the description "social liberal," can overcome the objections of many religious conservatives to win the Republican nomination.
Will his assurances to appoint judges in the mold of Roberts, Alito and Scalia be "enough" to put their concerns to rest? Will conservatives overlook social issues in an election focusing largely on foreign policy?
The more interesting question is whether Giuliani can establish a new description of what it means to be "socially conservative." Perhaps to be socially conservative means something more than just fidelity to pro-life and anti-gay marriage positions.
Giuliani has a convincing argument that he is an ethical or cultural conservative who in the end will protect the values that most conservative Republicans hold dear.
What does this mean? It means that he sees the world as a battle between good and evil, and politics as a struggle between decent hard working people and elites who have too little respect for their values -- public safety, respect for religion and public virtue.
His world view is not one of multi-culturalism or moral relativism. He shows no empathy for bullies -- be they Mafia bosses or Al Sharpton. Giuliani, of course, first rose to public prominence by fighting the largest bully he could find: the Mob. Time magazine called his prosecution in 1985 of 11 Mafia leaders the "Case of Cases" and quoted his declared intention to "wipe out the five families."
For him, it is all about who is good and who is not, regardless of whose feathers he might ruffle.
Liberal sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians and diplomatic niceties did not prevent him from tossing Yasser Arafat (with great delight) from Lincoln Center.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Well said.
Back then (1992/4) anti-abortion was assumed in the republican party.. as was many other issues that Giulani is "FOR".. Giuliani flys in the face of the republican platform (1992/4)..
hear = here
Back then (1992/4) anti-abortion was assumed in the republican party.. as was many other issues that Giulani is "FOR".. Giuliani flys in the face of the republican platform (1992/4)..
In the platform? So what? Meanwhile abortions continued.
Look I don't defend rudy on abortion and I do know that the House doesn't confirm judges. That said, Newt's sweep in '94 including many tossup districts was due in part to the lack of social issues in his contract.
GTG.
There's no doubt about it Meg...Rudy is a great candidate for the region he's from, but for the national ticket he'll alienate too much of the base when that segment has increasingly shown a propensity to give the republicans an ultimatum.
Bingo! After the 2006 elections it was the stay at home conservatives,independents,libertarians. I submit that those 3 showed up and pulled the R more than them.
Reagan appointed Rudy as his #3 man at Department of Justice.
Rudy was pleased to win the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award.
At the Reagan Library Gift Shop, all but 3 of the books sold under the "Ronald Reagan Book" section are about Reagan himself or presidential modes of transportation.
Rudy Giuliani's book Leadership is one of those 3 books.
The other 2 are written by Reagan's son and McCaslin.
Indeed, in one recent poll, majorities of Republicans who were informed of Giuliani’s views on social issues said that they were either minor issues or no issues at all; only 16% said that they wouldn't vote for him after being informed of these views.
In the online GOP Bloggers poll, Giuliani is consistently one of the few candidates to end up with a net positive acceptability rating. These internet denizens are well-informed, and overwhelmingly self-describe as conservative (78% self-describe as 7 or higher on a 10-scale of conservatism). If these people can support Rudy, anyone can.
Human Events, Is Giuliani the Republican Peyton Manning,
2/6/07
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1780060/posts
Rudy has a strong 84% conservative approval rating. (Battle ground poll as of Jan.11, '07)
Sam Brownback would support Rudy as presidential nominee, but thinks that he (Brownback) will enter race.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1752817/posts
Rudy defended Sen. George Allen against racism charges.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1709893/posts
Rudy stumped for Rep. Santorum
http://newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/4/19/115741.shtml?s=ic
The Rudy Giuliani Exploratory Committee today announced that Congressman Pete Sessions and former Congresswoman Susan Molinari are supporting Mayor Rudy Giuliani to be the next President of the United States. (Sessions has a 98% lifetime conservative rating)
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1783545/posts
Rudy stood up to the environmental whackjobs:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1780299/posts
An excellent article about Rudy’s fiscal and law and order conservatism:
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26604
Republican primary voters should rally around the GOP field's most accomplished supply-sider, the all-but-announced Rudolph W. Giuliani. Having sliced taxes and slashed Gotham's government, New York's former mayor is the leading fiscal conservative among 2008's GOP presidential contenders.
Before Giuliani's January 1, 1994 inauguration, New York's economy was on a stretcher. Amid soaring unemployment, 235 jobs vanished daily. Financier Felix Rohatyn complained: "Virtually all human activities are taxed to the hilt." Punitive taxes helped fuel a $2.3 billion deficit.
Mayor-elect Giuliani sounded Reaganesque when he announced he would "reduce the size and cost of city government" to balance the budget. In his first State of the City address, he said: "We're going to cut taxes to attract jobs so our people can work."
Rudy spent 8 years keeping those promises.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1782806/posts
Rudy warmly welcomed in SC by GOP Chair.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1676314/posts
In a very interesting City Journal article, Steven Malanga argues that "Yes, Rudy Guiliani Is a Conservative/And an electable one at that."
Malanga makes a strong case for Rudy as a Reagan-style conservative. After recounting Giuliani's record as mayor of New York City, in which, as Malanga establishes firmly, Rudy supported free markets and individual responsibility, as exemplified vividly in his tax cuts , welfare reform success, "zero tolerance" crimefighting, and firm rejection of racial politics.
As Malanga notes, Giuliani did this in what was one of the most leftist cities in the US.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1774783/posts
Even Reagan couldn't live up to Reagan in today's climate.
He was a great president, but he wasn't perfect.
He was divorced, married a pregnant Nancy, and signed the most liberal abortion legislation at the time when he was Governor of California. As president he gave us two lousy Supreme Court judges, signed amnesty legislation, raised taxes 4 times and after the presidency he actively pushed for federal gun legislation (the Brady Bill).
Ultra social conservative Pat Robertson thinks Rudy would make a good president.
Asked if Giuliani would be an acceptable 2008 presidential candidate to Christian conservatives, Pat Robertson told ABC's "This Week:" "He did a super job running the city of New York and I think he'd make a good president."
So when Arafat was in town for a U.N. conference and showed up uninvited to a concert at the Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, the mayor knew exactly what to do. He kicked him out.
The incident caused an uproar. Former mayor Ed Koch declared that "Giuliani has behavioral problems," and the Clinton administration was angered at Giuliani's boldness. Giuliani, however, was not swayed. "My only regret," he told an aide, "was that I didn't throw him out myself." Actions like this earned Giuliani the ire of Democrats everywhere in the '90s.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19980
Ronald Reagan on compromise:
When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn't like it. "Compromise" was a dirty word to them and they wouldn't face the fact that we couldn't get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don't get it all, some said, don't take anything.
I'd learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: 'I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.'
If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that's what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.
~~ Ronald Reagan, in his autobiography, An American Life .
The Hoover Institute, at which Reagan is an Honorary Fellow, thinks Rudy has been good for the GOP.
Working on a book about the Republican Party, last year Hoover fellow Peter Robinson spent some time with Rudolph Giuliani. Although Giuliani is no longer running for the Senate, Robinson argues that Giuliani’s accomplishments as mayor of New York City set an example for Republican candidates just the same. A portrait of a brilliant politician—and a great public servant.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3491481.html
---"How much clearer can Rudy be in saying he will apoint justices in the mold of Roberts and Alito?"---
How much clearly can Hitlery be in saying she opposes judicial activism?
Ya'll slipping.
12 posts deep before the spam hits.
Yes.
But then, I support a ban against persons convicted of using a gun to commit a violent felony from ever owning guns again unless they are pardoned.
I believe that many persons who support gun ownership by violent felons are themselves convicted felons, or persons who sympathize with violent convicted felons.
I also support a ban against violent mentally ill prople who are committed due to being too insane to face trial ever owning guns again unless they regain their sanity.
I believe that anybody who wants violent mentally ill people to own guns have a screw loose themselves.
I support abortion if it is necessary to save the life of the mother.
I believe that anybody who would force a woman to die rather than let her live is a murderer.
I imagine you disagree with these positions.
You are either conservative(slack jawed) or progressive(for progress)..
-AND- "conservatives" are oblivious to all that..
Many republicans actually call themselves conservatives..
How bout that.. Back in the nintys only progressives called republicans conservatives.. Not so today.. even on FR.. The brain wash is nearing completion..
Conservative = same old, same old... More of the same..
NOTE: more of the SAME conservative socialism NOT the new fresh socialism offered by progressives.. And most republicans remain oblivious.. Slack Jawed..
You nailed it. This train is being driven by pro-aborts who don't care one way of the other about the Second Amendment. And they loathe conservatives.
Everything in that (my) list is accurate. Your comment on it is spam -- it's empty, it says nothing.
I submit that those 3 showed up and pulled the R more than them.
In '06, I was going to vote for 1 Dem on the ballot but at the last minute I voted straight ticket R just because the Dems were too confident.
Everything in that (my) list is accurate.
That's nice but I still won't vote for him.
What a load of crap.
How about we let Rudy speak for himself on this issue. Here's an archive of his weekly column from when he initiated the lawsuit against the gun industry.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/rwg/html/2000a/weekly/wkly0626.html
The federal government highly regulates the sale of firearms, and gun manufacturers can only sell them through federally licensed dealers.
Since Federal law doesn't ban firearms, and he wasn't able to disarm everyone as long as people in some part of the country could buy guns, he tried to bankrupt the gun industry because of the actions of criminals even though the gun industry sold the firearms legally through federally licensed dealers.
What were the crimes of the gun industry?
Deliberately manufacturing many more firearms than can be bought for legitimate purposes such as hunting and law enforcement, and knowingly targeting these excess guns to criminals, youths and other persons unqualified to buy firearms;
Notice that self defense isn't a legitimate purpose for owning a gun. Notice that while he says hunting is a legitimate purpose he misrepresents the gun industry's marketing of hunting and target shooting guns designed for young shooters. While a minor cannot purchase a gun, they do legally use them to hunt and shoot. He also apparently thinks he knows best as to how many guns people should be allowed to own.
Deliberately undermining New York City's gun control laws by flooding other markets which have less stringent gun laws with firearms that the manufacturers know are destined to be illegally resold in New York City;
In other words, they simply followed the law and sold guns according to federal regulations, through federally licensed dealers. He felt that not only should he be able to unconstitutionally restrict gun ownership in NYC, he demanded that guns not be sold elsewhere as well.
Ignoring the illegal practices of gun distributors, many of whom openly engage in the above practices;
The authority to investigate illegal actions of gun dealers and to revoke their licenses lies with the federal government. The gun industry already bears the burden of operating in a heavily regulated industry and is following the appropriate regulations.
The anti-gun lobby has continuously tried to create draconian restrictions at the federal level and has failed. They have tried to smear the names of gun dealers, not because the dealers broke the law, but because guns they sold eventually fell into the hands of criminals, or were even traced for some other reason such as they were recovered stolen property.
However, congress has not legislated the restrictions they want, so they seek to gain them through frivolous litigation.
Refusing to manufacture safer guns, with features such as trigger locks and "personalization" measures that allow only authorized persons to fire the weapon.
Such "features" have proven to be unreliable and expensive. They also can be circumvented given time, so their only benefit would be preventing quick access by an unauthorized person.
Personalized guns are a foolish and expensive way to achieve that goal, and make the guns less reliable.
It's not the gun manufacturers refused to design such guns, there's simply no market for them. Even the police forces don't want them.
This is simply a ploy to drive up the costs of guns and make it more difficult for law abiding citizens (especially the poor) to afford firearms.
This got shot down at the federal level, so he and other anti-gun extremists tried to force the gun industry into bankruptcy to gain the same end result of driving up the costs of guns.
Rudy isn't slightly anti-gun. He is extremely anti-gun and he has shown that he has absolutely no respect for the constitution or the rule of law when they get in the way of something he believes in.
Rudy was a great leader in the wake of 9/11. He has been a strong supporter of our troops in the war.
Rudy has been good at stamping out corruption, but he respect for the rule of law is inconsistent. He obstructed the federal government in finding and prosecuting illegal aliens and his efforts to punish the gun industry for following federal gun laws through civil suits are examples of this.
I agree with a number of things that Rudy has done, and I admire his leadership. However, if he has something he believes in he will not let the rule of law, or the constitution stand in his way. He only respects laws and rights that he agrees with, and that is why I will not vote for him.
That's nice but I still won't vote for him.
It's Deja Vu all over again.
To which I responed: I don't support Rudy now, but if Rudy were to get the nomination, I would vote for hime against Hillary.
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