Okay. You've showed me your strawman, now I'll show you mine:
Posted on 02/26/2007 7:08:07 AM PST by areafiftyone
When Rudolph Giuliani first ran for mayor of New York in 1989, he made a critical mistake. Assuming that he'd be running against the blue-collar, socially conservative Democrat Ed Koch, Giuliani cast himself as a liberal. Playing against his tough-guy image, he spent his first months on the campaign trail talking about the victims of homelessness and AIDS and drug abuse, causes that united elite liberals and poor minority voters while leaving the city's shrinking middle class cold. The prosecutor who brought down mob boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Wall Street renegade Ivan Boesky tried to reinvent himself as the original "compassionate conservative," and the ethnic Catholic who had once considered the priesthood flip-flopped on abortion and became an avowed pro-choicer.
Then fate intervened: David Dinkins defeated Koch in the Democratic primary, and Giuliani became, by necessity if not by design, the candidate of the unfashionable middle-class strivers living in the outer boroughs, voters who recognized something of themselves in Giuliani, a self-made Italian-American from Brooklyn. Thus was born the polarizing, hard-charging, and proudly uncompassionate Giuliani who, after losing to Dinkins in 1989, beat him in 1993 and went on to transform New York.
Almost two decades later, though, Giuliani seems at risk of following his 1989 playbook, selling himself as something he's not--this time, a George W. Bush Republican--in the hopes that his celebrity and high favorability ratings will allow him to win the GOP nomination without a fight. Or at least that seems to be the underlying logic of Giuliani's ultra-cautious noncampaign so far. With the exception of a handful of social issues where an explicit flip-flop would look too craven even by today's standards, Giuliani, a sui generis figure, is improbably presenting himself as the kind of unremarkable Bush conservative whose domestic agenda starts with tax cuts and ends with "comprehensive" immigration reform.
Which is too bad, because an orthodox, Grover Norquist-approved Republican candidate is precisely what the party doesn't need--and precisely what Giuliani wasn't during his two terms as mayor. His genius wasn't for cutting government ("down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," as Norquist famously put it) but rather for reforming it and making it work for the working and middle-class taxpayers who elected him, rather than elite liberals who had run City Hall into the ground. He offered a municipal version of the reformism that governors like Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson (who passed on his welfare czar to Giuliani) and Michigan's John Engler pursued at the state level in the 1990s--a conservatism targeted explicitly to voters who wanted to keep the welfare state in place but didn't want the Democrats to run it.
This was the tradition that George W. Bush, another successful nineties governor, was supposed to revive in his 2000 campaign, after the Gingrich revolutionaries lost their way. But while Bush's instincts were sound, his insistence on "compassion" as the appropriate attitude toward the poor struck exactly the wrong note. It spoke to upper-middle class feelings of noblesse oblige, not to the aspirations of poor Americans with a drive to succeed. As Mickey Kaus argued when the Bush campaign theme was first unveiled in 1999, the language of compassion has an inegalitarian and even condescending edge. Worse, it effaces the all-important distinction between those who deserve public assistance and those who do not.
Giuliani, by contrast, has always been a "respect" conservative. Delivering safe streets to New Yorkers wasn't an act of magnanimity, but rather an obligation. And, as Giuliani made clear, citizens and public servants were expected to fulfill their obligations as well. Anyone who failed to abide by this basic contract, whether a petty thief or a police commander who failed to meet crime-reduction targets, would be held accountable.
As commonplace as this might sound, it's difficult to overstate how dramatic a break it was with the city's reigning political culture. As mayor, Giuliani stood almost alone against the tendency Fred Siegel dubbed "dependent individualism"--the noxious idea that individuals ought to be freed from obligations to family and community through the largesse of a generous welfare system. "Dependent individualism" fueled the rise of a new class of ethnic shakedown artists. Unlike the old patronage machines, which trafficked in corruption yet delivered tangible benefits and served as engines of political assimilation, self-appointed spokesmen for "the Community" like Al Sharpton demanded deference while offering nothing but bluster and veiled threats. Their chants of "no justice, no peace"--that is, threats of civil violence designed to intimidate authority--brought the Dinkins administration to its knees.
Because Sharpton had no respect for public order, Giuliani had no respect for Sharpton and all those who mimicked Sharpton's contemptuous disregard for authority. Instead, he insisted on subjecting all comers to a single standard, even if it meant taking a political hit. An emblematic moment came in July 1999 when Giuliani, increasingly
It's difficult to imagine a "compassionate conservative" saying anything like this. And such impolitic honesty helps explain why Giuliani spent much of his second term as an unpopular figure--in spite of plunging crime rates and welfare rolls, and New York's economic comeback--before 9/11 transformed him into "America's mayor." Once Giuliani tamed the ungovernable city, he suddenly seemed too tough and hard-edged even for New York.
But after the drift and incompetence of the Bush years, it's easy to see how "respect conservatism" could be presented as a tonic for what ails the country, and as a way for the Giuliani campaign to distinguish its candidate from the incumbent. (One can only imagine how Hizzoner would have reacted to the Abramoff or Enron scandals, or Hurricane Katrina, or the mismanagement of the Iraq war.) A Giuliani domestic agenda that builds on his reputation for tough-minded competence could translate into policies that unite conservatives and independent voters.
On immigration, for instance, a "respect conservatism" might marry Giuliani's avowed support for earned legalization to what Hudson fellow John Fonte has called "civic conservatism," which emphasizes assimilation and civic education and rejects multiculturalism and multilingualism. Instead of Bush-style compassion for new arrivals, civic conservatism would offer them a fair shake--the opportunity to become Americans, but only if they're willing to embrace America's common culture and language.
Moreover, Giuliani could cast any immigration reform as part of a broader effort to reform homeland security, which has become something of a punchline during the Bush years. The national infrastructure--electricity grids, ports, railroads, and highways--presents an inviting target, and the uncertain state of the war on terror makes it likely that many Americans will be looking for a candidate who promises to shore up defenses at home. Giuliani's past makes this a natural campaign issue for him: As a foe of lawbreakers and a tamer of bureaucracies, he's perfectly positioned to make the case for, say, a new push for border security that reduces the threat posed by immigrant gangs, or a reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that a Katrina-style debacle never happens again, or a broader plan to shore up infrastructure by strengthening and decentralizing the networks that sustain industrial civilization.
Meanwhile, because "respect conservatism" is premised on treating all people as equals, Giuliani the candidate would be a natural spokesman for a renewed attack on racial preferences, a still potent issue that President Bush abandoned, finding it ill-suited to his "compassion" agenda. But attacking preferences and offering nothing in their place is a narrow strategy that's unlikely to inspire voters, particularly younger voters deeply invested in the dramatic gains made by women and minorities in recent years. By proposing a grand bargain that replaces preferences with either class-based affirmative action or wage subsidies designed to expand the middle class, Giuliani could take the fight to liberalism: Why do you want to divide the disadvantaged by race, he could ask, when you can include them in a flourishing economy?
Then there's the economy, where Democratic populists have adopted a political rhetoric that poormouths America and paints middle class families as victims. Like President Bush's language of compassion, there's a condescending message behind all this economic fear-mongering, and it offers an opening for a "respect conservative" to acknowledge working-class struggles but emphasize the importance of civic and personal responsibility, both in the boardroom and the bedroom. The Rudy Giuliani who took down Ivan Boesky could be an ideal critic of corporate irresponsibility, for instance, and the mayor who once scolded Margarita Rosario for raising her son to be a criminal might be the right man to take on the relationship between economic insecurity and America's epidemic of fatherlessness.
Such an agenda, not incidentally, would offer a sharp contrast not only with President Bush, but with John McCain, Giuliani's principal rival for the nomination. Where McCain tends to embrace the elite media's pet causes, from campaign finance reform to the patient's bill of rights, a Giuliani "respect conservatism" would be proudly anti-elitist, emphasizing issues that resonate with working and middle class Americans. It would be pitched not to the media, but to the voters who made Rudy mayor--and who might make him president as well.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are writing a book on Sam's Club Republicans.
Listen I told you that I"m anti-abortion already. That's enough. If you want to go into gory details I'm sure the Rudy haters have all the stuff and pictures you can drool and pant over. They seem to like looking at the pictures and reading the details.
Kiss where the sun don't shine.
Dear areafiftyone,
"Rudy will appoint anti-abortion judges like he said and it will go to the states like it should."
Please cite a single instance where Mr. Giuliani has said he'd appoint "anti-abortion judges."
sitetest
I'm a Presbyterian, but somehow I manage to vote for candidates all the time that are not. I suppose your side thinks I should stay home until a good Presbyterian runs for office?
Yeah, Rooty is pretty absurd when you really think about it.
"Most of Clinton's policies are very similar to most of mine." - Rudy Giuliani
A good friend of mine was the architect of Giuliani's welfare reform program in NYC. Same guy also designed Wisconsin's program. He is now in Israel reforming its welfare system. This guy is a dyed-in-the-wool "movement" conservative who worked in the Reagan administration. So I know that Giuliani does employ and inspire conservatives, and agrees with conservative philosophy on many domestic issues.
Find where I said that and post it in quotes. If you can't do that and you can't. Then shut your lying mouth.
Yes, you are a liar because I didn't say it.
So you choose a "leader" who would be happy to pay for the murder of his own grandchild?
That statement is SO foul, I don't see how anyone who claims to be pro-life could support Giuliani.
Nobody is conservative enough.
This group would trash Jesus himself for telling people to pay their taxes rather than fighting to cut them.
And yet he never appointed a SINGLE conservative judge in NY.
Odd, that.
Okay. You've showed me your strawman, now I'll show you mine:
This article is marked as being from "Free Republic," but linked to at "the Weekly Standard." These two publications are often confused, but rarely cross-linked. I, therefore, presume it's a mistake, especially since I am a regular NR reader and never heard of the authors.
Well, good for you. Do that about a billion more times and your boy might lead in a poll or two.
The term Respect Conservative is a good term for Rudy G. And NRO is doing what most will do. Realize that the Dems cannot be allowed to win. Mitt , St. John, Newt , Hunter, no one there will beat either Her Highness or BO. Rudy G could do it with a good conserv VP choice. I want to win. I do not want to go down as in Nov. '06 with my marvy principles in tact and my Party out of power. At least the Stupid Party (GOP) gets it right once in awhile. The Evil Party(Dems) never gets it right.
You distort what he said.
Click on the link again - it goes right there.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes, doubled the size of government, gave amnesty to millions of illegals, and gave arms to the Iranians.
He appointed James Webb to his administration twice.
He had George Bush Sr. as a vice president.
He nominated Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Conner to the Supreme Court
Reagan was an actor, the head of a union, and a life-long democrat until he changed parties.
Reagan was certainly a "good enough" conservative. But nobody is pure, nobody is perfect. The few that come close won't win an election because true pure conservatives (whatever THAT is, we certainly can't agree in THIS board what positions are the "truly conservative") make up a minority of voters in this country, and the majority will be happy to vote for a conservative only if it looks like they are reasoned, open, and willing to compromise to get things done.
Reagan won because Carter was an unmitigated disaster. He won again because he knew when to compromise and managed to make a LOT of people happy, including independents.
Gulliani certainly isn't MY pick for president, but he'd be a better fiscal conservative than George Bush has been.
Admin moderators please correct the link title. Thanks!
I don't know how many judges he gets to choose. A lot of our judges are elected here in NY. Plus there's the fact that there aren't a lot of conservatives here AND the fact that, if they need to get through the City Council, they won't. At last count, there's maybe 2 or 3 Republicans in the entire City Council. We're outnumbered by at least 5 - 1 here in the People's Republic of New York. These people would elect Noriega over Reagan or either of the Bushes.
The forum owner equating Rudy supporters with treason is pretty stupid. I'd rather be rude than stupid, but that's just me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.