Posted on 03/10/2007 5:42:54 AM PST by veronica
For the moment, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sits on double-digit leads over the rest of the Republican presidential-hopeful pack in several national polls.
Why?
"It appears to me that Rudy is going aggressively after the conservative vote," says Pennsylvania Republican and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. "He has not ceded that ground to anybody."
Santorum, known nationally for his social conservatism, says Giuliani does a good job of reminding people how he governed as a conservative on crime, welfare and taxes in New York City.
Santorum also believes Giuliani has scored points on social issues with his comments about judges and Supreme Court justices.
"Rudy understands that, on those issues, the courts are where conservatives have been losing the battle," he says. "If he is going to be appointing judges in the Scalia-Thomas (mold), then he is sending a very positive message to conservatives that he understands the importance of having the Constitution interpreted for what it says and not for what people want it to be."
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
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.
Rudy IS a democrat, and a liar.
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
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
He'll tower over her on election day too. :)
My goodness, you're quite an ill mannered troll.
In New York, where generations of liberal policy had produced a city in which one in seven citizens lived off government benefits, in which lawbreakers whose actions diminished everyone else’s quality of life were routinely ignored or excused, in which the rights of those who broke the law were often defended vigorously over the rights of those who adhered to it, Giuliani’s prescriptions for an urban revival based on shared civic values seemed unrealistic to some and dangerous to others. The head of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter described Giuliani’s ideas on respect for authority and the law as “frightening” and “scary.” But New Yorkers who had watched their city deteriorate were more frightened of life under an outdated and ineffective liberal agenda. Giuliani rode to victory in 1993 with heavy support from the same white ethnic Democratic voters who, nearly a decade earlier, had crossed party lines even in liberal New York to vote for Ronald Reagan.
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.
For Giuliani, the revival of New York started with securing public safety, because all other agendas were useless if citizens didn’t feel protected. “The most fundamental of civil rights is the guarantee that government can give you a reasonable degree of safety,” Giuliani said. He aimed to do so by reinstituting respect for the law. As a federal prosecutor in New York in the 1980s, he had vigorously hunted low-level drug dealers—whom other law enforcement agencies ignored—because he thought that the brazen selling of drugs on street corners cultivated disrespect for the law and encouraged criminality. “You have to . . . dispel cynicism about law enforcement by showing we treat everyone alike, whether you are a major criminal or a low-level drug pusher,” Giuliani explained.
As mayor, he instituted a “zero tolerance” approach that cracked down on quality-of-life offenses like panhandling and public urination (in a city where some streets reeked of urine), in order to restore a sense of civic order that he believed would discourage larger crimes. “Murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes,” he explained. “But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.” He linked the Dinkins era’s permissive climate, which tolerated the squeegee men (street-corner windshield cleaners who coerced drivers into giving them money at the entrances to Manhattan), to the rise of more serious crime. “The police started ignoring all kinds of offenses,” Giuliani later recounted of the Dinkins years. They “became,” he deadpanned, “highly skilled observers of crime.”
Civil rights advocates warned that Giuliani’s promise to deprive the squeegee men of their $40–100 weekly shakedown might drive them to more violent crime; in effect, they endorsed a lesser form of criminality, hoping that it would forestall more serious crime. The city’s newspapers were happy to print threats from squeegee men, like this one: “I feel like if I can’t hustle honestly, I’ve got to go back to doing what I used to do . . . robbing and stealing.” But the squeegee-men campaign provided Giuliani with his first significant victory, showing a beleaguered citizenry that government actually could bring about change for the better. Within months, the squeegee men disappeared. “A city, and especially a city like New York, should be a place of optimism,” Giuliani later explained about his policing strategies. “Quality of life is about focusing on the things that make a difference in the everyday life of all New Yorkers in order to restore this spirit of optimism.”
Giuliani changed the primary mission of the police department to preventing crime from happening rather than merely responding to it once it had occurred. His police chief, William Bratton, reorganized the NYPD, emphasizing a street-crimes unit that moved around the city, flooding high-crime areas and getting guns off the street. Bratton also changed the department’s scheduling. Crime was open for business 24 hours a day, but most detectives, including narcotics cops, had previously gone off duty at 5 pm, just as criminals were coming on duty. No more.
The department brought modern management techniques to its new mission. It began compiling a computerized database to track the city’s crime patterns and the effectiveness of the NYPD’s responses to them. That database, known as Compstat, helped police target their manpower where it was needed, and in due course it became a national model. The department drove authority down to its precinct captains and emphasized that it expected results from these top managers. Bratton replaced a third of the city’s 76 precinct commanders within a few months. “If you were to manage a bank with 76 branches every day, you would get a profit-and-loss statement from the bank,” explained Giuliani. “After a week or so, you would see branches that were going in the wrong direction, and then you would take management action to try to reverse the trend. That is precisely what is happening in the police department.”
The policing innovations led to a historic drop in crime far beyond what anyone could have imagined, with total crime down by some 64 percent during the Giuliani years, and murder (the most reliable crime statistic) down 67 percent, from 1,960 in Dinkins’s last year to 640 in Giuliani’s last year. The number of cars stolen in New York City every year plummeted by an astounding 78,000.
Criminologists tried to dismiss this achievement by arguing that the police have little influence on crime. The crime drop, they contended, was merely the fruit of an improving national economy, though the decline preceded the city’s economic rebound by several years. Others argued that New York was just riding a demographic trend, as the population of teenagers prone to break the law declined. One criminologist even suggested that Giuliani’s New York would soon see another upsurge, as a new cohort of children reached the teen years. “I don’t need a crystal ball,” the criminologist confidently predicted. Instead, crime declined relentlessly over Giuliani’s eight years, even when it rose nationally.
Critics, especially those on the left, have tried to minimize Giuliani’s accomplishment by claiming that he lowered crime by letting cops oppress black and Latino New Yorkers with brute force. As evidence, they point to unfortunate incidents such as the shootings of unarmed black immigrants Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. But the data tell a far different story: Giuliani’s NYPD managed to drive down crime while showing admirable restraint. From 1995 to 2000, civilian complaints of excessive force by the NYPD declined from one complaint per ten officers to one per 19 officers. Meanwhile, shootings by cops declined by 50 percent and were far lower under Giuliani than under Dinkins—lower in fact than in cities like San Diego and Houston, hailed for practicing community policing.
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
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
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."
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
Being a Bible thumper from Virginia who went to school in Kentucky, let me clarify.
I grew up in Christian fundamentalism and in the Christian poltiical right. For the most part I still share the same philosophy.
But it is the way in which it is applied that disturbs me. The stridency and the "my way or the highway" position of the political religious right is troublesome. And it's a turn off for a huge portion of the electorate.
The fact remains that Rudy IS the front runner. The fact remains that RUDY is drawing significant amounts of conservative support, including Evangelicals of which I am one.
So pro-life, conservative, evangelicals like myself who see the war on terror and national security the larger issue here really tire of our "brethren" calling us liberals, traitors, baby-killers, etc.
If you can't support Rudy, so be it.
If you have to vote third party, so be it.
If you plan to stay home, so be it. However that also negates your right to comment.
If you find the air not so fresh around here, with a few exceptions, it is not the Rudy supporters stinking it up.
How many times have you been called "abortionist" or "rutard" or "liberal" or "traitor" this week?
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
Yep, that "Rudy is a conservative" spam is as old, tired and false as it gets.
I know that I will never convince a Rudy supporter to come over to my side & I guess you all realize you will never do the same to us. At first, I - like a lot of freepers - thought that by posting articles & facts that supported my candidate - I would be able to sway people over to my way of thinking. But I think we've all seen the facts & we're all pretty entrenched in who we support. If there are people sitting on the fence right now - the way both of our sides are acting - neither one of us will do much convincing.
I've made a decision that I'm going to refrain from such "wheel spinning" - it gets us nowhere. Rudy's not a monster - he did good things in NY - but he is not what I want to see in the oval office. I like Duncan Hunter - I am a social conservative & he is too. It's way too early to say who will win - so I say - may the best man win.
It's my day off - I'm going to go do something fun. I really mean it - y'all have a nice day. :-D
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