At the moment, Fred is clearly the best candidate.
As for your question, my answer is definitely “No.”
I might conceivably vote for Romney if he were by some miracle to win the primaries. I would hold my nose while I did it, because he is a flip flopper and a smooth talker who cannot be trusted. But I would never vote for Rudy.
Sometimes if the best is not available you have to vote for the good. Unfortunately, Rudy does not represent second-best, he represents disaster. I could NEVER vote for an abortionist, a disrespecter of the 2nd Amendment, another amnesty freak who would give amnesty to a hundred million illegal immigrants.
Yes, Hillary is even worse, but if Rudy were elected he would destroy the party and set back the conservative and pro-life causes by decades.
I think we need to make that perfectly clear right now, before the primaries. Rudy is simply not acceptable, and if the party is stupid enough to nominate him, then the party will die. It’s better to make that perfectly clear now than to have to deal with it later.
I have only rarely voted for third party candidates over the course of my life. I certainly voted for Bob Dole in 1992, although I thought he was a lousy choice. But I would not vote for Giuliani. Never. And I am certain that 20 million Evangelicals would stay home if he were nominated, for similar reasons.
This is entirely a different matter from voting third party because the candidate isn’t quite pure enough, which I agree is stupid. This is putting the truth on the table about Giuliani. He would destroy the party and the conservative cause if he were nominated. It must not happen.
We’re at war right now. We have troops in the field who’s very lives depend upon this election. Do they deserve someone like Hillary Clinton as their Commander In Chief? The 4,000 who have died would have died for nothing. Because as sure as the sun rises, a Democrat president will cut and run from Iraq. We’ll see a repeat of Vietnam in 1975. And the GOP voters who stayed home in 2008 will have just as much blood on their hands as the stuanchest anti-war candidate.
We honor Ronald Reagan as a great president because of what he did to end the Cold War. Yet a check on his record against illegal immigration and abortion is spotty. He signed a bill in 1986 that gave amnesty to illegals. And while he was a staunch pro-life supporter, his SCOTUS appointee Sandra Day O’ Conner was no friend of the movement.