EJ Dionne: We Created a System That Causes Politicians to 'Adjust' Their Views

Giuliani's moderately pro-choice stand will test whether this is as much of a straitjacket as the demands of a party whip.

Moderately pro-choice!!? You don't get more pro-abortion than being "firmly" in support of Partial Birth Abortion:

Rudy Giuliani Supports Partial Birth Abortion...Do You?

[GEORGE] WILL: Is your support of partial birth abortion firm?
Mayor GIULIANI: All of my positions are firm. I have strong viewpoints. I express them. And I--I do not think that it makes sense to be changing your position....
ABC News February 6, 2000

TUCHMAN: Giuliani was then asked whether he supports a ban on what critics call partial-birth abortions, something Bush strongly supports.
GIULIANI: No, I have not supported that, and I don't see my position on that changing.
- CNN December 2, 1999

BLITZER: If you were in the Senate and [President Clinton] vetoed, once again, the [ban on the] so-called partial-birth abortion procedure, you would vote against sustaining that against the -- in favor of the veto in other words, you would support the president on that.
GIULIANI: Yes. I said then that I support him, so I have no reason to change my mind about it.
BLITZER: All right. So the bottom line is that on a lot of these very sensitive issues whether on guns, abortion, patients' bill of rights, taxes, you are more in line with the president and by association, with Mrs. Clinton, than you are against them.
- CNN February 6, 2000

MR. RUSSERT: A banning of late-term abortions, so-called partial-birth abortions--you're against that?

MAYOR GIULIANI: I'm against it in New York, because in New York...

MR. RUSSERT: Well, if you were a senator, would you vote with the president or against the president? [Note: President Clinton was in office in 2000]

MAYOR GIULIANI: I would vote to preserve the option for women. I think that choice is a very difficult one. It's a very, very--it's one in which people of conscious have very, very different opinions. I think the better thing for America to do is to leave that choice to the woman, because it affects her probably more than anyone else....

MR. RUSSERT: So you won't change your view on late-term abortion in order to get the Conservative Party endorsement?

MAYOR GIULIANI: It isn't just that. We shouldn't limit this to one issue. I'm generally not going to change my views
- NBC Meet the Press, February 6, 2000

***Note: the version of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban that Giuliani opposed in 2000, that he said he supported Bill Clinton in vetoing the Republican-controlled Congress's legislation, contained the exception for the life of the mother that Rudy is now trying to pretend is a prerequisite for his support of it.

Many equally principled Republicans were animated largely by skepticism of government interference in the marketplace, support for lower taxes and, in many cases, a belief in an assertive foreign policy.

Yet politicians who acknowledged that abortion was not one of their driving concerns would be denounced, oddly enough, as unprincipled.

There used to be a day when Republicans focused on a lot of things besides abortion. Today, it's about the only thing people focus on, as though 9/11 never happened.

As for the politicians, we have created a system that encourages many in their ranks to adjust their convictions to their political needs. And then we denounce them.

In a way, he is right. But he then misses the point.

The real point is that the Supreme Court removed the abortion debate from the political process. Politicians must argue it, but cannot really have any direct impact. Abortion should be back in the political process. Then the abortion stand of politicians will actually matter.

Giuliani's moderately pro-choice stand will test whether this is as much of a straitjacket as the demands of a party whip.

MODERATELY!?!!?!

To the leftists, anything short of offering to commit infanticide on the White House lawn at high noon is considered moderate.

Rudy Giuliani's support for abortion rights seems more constant, but his position, too, has evolved over the years, as Ray Rivera reported in the New York Times on Saturday.

Evolved? Either you are for it or against. Pretty simple.

Politicians are the people's representatives (when elected) so they MUST consider the views of the people.

Rudy is triangulation mode right now big time.

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

Come on, Peach, don't spam the thread like that.

An interesting philosophical discussion of why politicians do what they do and say what they say degrades into an attack on a single candidate for a single position.

Oh well.

I'll tell you what. I'll stop the second that partial birth abortion picture isn't put on threads as spam.

As an aside, the mods have been told to let the spam continue (at least as it relates to the anti-Rudy stuff), we we'll see how they feel about the pro-Rudy stuff.

I think Mitt has flip flopped more than Rudy so far. (sad that it's come to that)

The real point is that the Supreme Court removed the abortion debate from the political process. Politicians must argue it, but cannot really have any direct impact. Abortion should be back in the political process. Then the abortion stand of politicians will actually matter.

Many politicians, of course, don't want it to matter.

Politicians don't like making decisions that could prove controversial (like this silly ass "non-binding resolution").

As long as a get a bit of baked beans...

with me spam...

I'm OK!

Abortionspeak: "Reproductive choice" sounds so much better than "sucking babies out of wombs piece by piece."

'Yes, we used to think that punching a hole in the back of a childs head and sucking out the brains was fine, and we were proud to fight for that right, but after our most recent failure we have reconsidered this procedure. Now our policy is that the procedure is in poor taste." "Will you vote for us now?" -- Voltage (sarcasm)

Reproductive Health means THE BABY GETS TO LIVE.

Daddies, don't let your children not grow up... If you plant the seed, tend the crops.

Go post that graphic on DU - see what happens. Do they freak out? Pull it? Call us Nazis?

After all, it's perfectly consistent for a progressive committed to broad public provision for the poor to believe that abortion is wrong. It's equally consistent for a conservative opposed to government meddling in the marketplace to support a woman's right to choose.

It is odd that this issue, which is not directly related to the main conservative vs. liberal debates, has come to be so definitely as a core principle by each side.

The real point is that the Supreme Court removed the abortion debate from the political process.

We have a winner!

In Europe there is no equivalent of our Supreme Court pronouncement. Every issue remains a political question.

Therefore in Europe almost every country has more restrictions on abortions than the US does, and in few if any European countries is it a major polarizing political issue in the same way it is here.

In my view a Rudy nomination will RUIN the party. We would loose 80% of our positions for 1 guy (for maybe 1 presidential term). It's not worh it.

I'm fighting against his campaign. And should he somehow get the Republican nomination, not only will I stop donating to the party, I'll freagin' cut a check to Hillary and post proof here on FR.

That's how bad I think this nomination is going to be for the Repoublican party. Call me crazy...call me a troll..I don't care