Subsequently, the Great Society and the McGovern movement drove the social conservatives into the GOP camp. It was these Reagan Democrats who made the GOP a majority. Now the Rudybots are doing all in their power to throw us out so they can return the party to the glory days of Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. If Rudy gets the nomination, they will have succeeded.
Actually, it was Jimmy Carter that drove Democrats to Reagan.
I'm told that Rooty was a McGovernite.
If Rudy gets the nomination, the DemocRATS will win the Presidency. He's too much of a gun-grabbing, pro-gay, abortionistic statist to win on a national level. He can try to reinvent himself, but his record speaks for itself.
You didn't have to agree with Reagan on social issues to vote for him. Northeastern liberal and moderate Republicans voted for him. And you didn't have to agree with him on economic or constitutional questions either. Southern and Catholic Democrats were also for Reagan. To vote for Reagan, you had to A) want to stand up to the Soviets and B) want to put recession and inflation behind us.
I don't know if Rudy would make a good or a bad president. I certainly disagree with him about a lot of things. What people are responding to in Giuliani, though, is the same kind of broad, popular, patriotic appeal that Reagan enjoyed. Those Reagan Democrats, if they're still there, aren't going to vote for Duncan Hunter, but it looks as though they may vote for Giuliani.
Whatever Rudy is or isn't, he certainly isn't John Lindsay, or even Nelson Rockefeller. It may not look like that the further you get from New York, but in the context of local politics he was very much the anti-Lindsay, and at least a little bit the anti-Rockefeller.