Rudy Giuliani: Lifelong Liberal

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has been barnstorming the nation, claiming the Ronald Reagan mantle. Recent opinion polls suggest his campaign is striking a chord with the GOP's rank and file but indicate most Republicans don't really know where Mr. Giuliani stands on key issues.

Those who do know are glossing over some very striking philosophical flaws -- at least from a truly conservative perspective. Rudy not only supports abortion but also has advocated for partial-birth abortion and government funding of abortion. He favors gun control, gay rights, domestic partnerships and bias-crime laws. And that's just a short list.

As a conservative activist who has observed Giuliani for many years (and who ran against him in the 1993 mayoral election), I can say categorically that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a conservative. In my judgment, his record leaves no doubt that he's a lifelong liberal.

In college, Rudy attacked senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, as an "incompetent, confused and sometimes idiotic man," and he urged Republicans to "find men who will adequately address themselves to the problems of discrimination, of poverty, of education, of public housing and the many more problems that Sen. Goldwater and company throw aside in the name of small laissez-faire government."

Former New York governor Mario Cuomo, a liberal icon, put it this way: "(Giuliani's) basically very pragmatic. And he's progressive. He is not a Neanderthal, a primitive conservative. But look, he's a clever human being. He can shave and draw fine distinctions when he needs to."

Giuliani's first wife, Regina, agreed. She told Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett that when she and Rudy separated in 1980, she "still considered him to be a liberal Democrat." She also observed that "(Rudy) generally won't do things unless he believes them, ... but he's not a saint, and he will do things that serve his interests."

Rudy first switched from Democrat to Independent, and then to Republican, not because he embraced the tenets of conservatism but in order to move up the U.S. Justice Department ladder.

"He only became a Republican after he began to get all these (Justice Department) jobs," Rudy's mother, Helen Giuliani, told Barrett. "He's definitely not a conservative Republican. He thinks he is, but he isn't. He still feels very sorry for the poor."

As a candidate for mayor of New York, Giuliani distanced himself from Ronald Reagan and the GOP. During his first mayoral bid, in 1989, The New York Times pointed out that he "noted frequently that he was supported by the liberal wing of the Republican Party and maintained that he never embraced Mr. Reagan's broad conservative agenda." And when conservatives attacked him during that 1993 mayoral campaign, Giuliani said, "Their fear of me is that I'm going to be a beachhead for the establishment of a more progressive form of Republicanism."

On another occasion he told a television host, "I do not look to see what the catechism of conservatism says about how to solve a problem."

And we mustn't forget that when Giuliani endorsed governor Cuomo for reelection to a fourth term in 1994, he did so, he said, because Republican George Pataki had "a very right-wing voting record" and because Pataki proposed an "irresponsible" 25 percent state income tax cut.

Giuliani also seriously considered endorsing Bill Clinton in 1996 and instead backed Republican nominee Bob Dole with very little fanfare.

Some Republicans and conservatives are now claiming that Rudy has changed and really become more conservative, and they cite as an example his abandonment of his former vehement opposition to school vouchers. But when Rudy Crew, former New York City Public Schools chancellor, asked Giuliani about this policy shift, the mayor said, "Don't worry about it. It's just a political thing, a campaign thing. I'm not going to do anything. Don't take it seriously." This particular rightward shift was simply a ploy to enhance Giuliani's 2000 U.S. Senate candidacy.

Contrary to what we've been hearing and reading, Rudy Giuliani is today what he has always been: a liberal. Conservatives should take stories of his Damascus Road-like conversion with a grain of salt. Rudy, like Hillary, is campaigning for the presidency in order to implement lifelong leftist beliefs.

George J. Marlin's latest book is "Squandered Opportunities: New York's Pataki Years" (St. Augustine's Press, 2006). In 1993, he was the Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York City.

This is pure b.x. Here’s the real record—most of it conservative. He used Reaganomics to put NYC in the black for the first time in fifty years. He saved hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars by reorganizing the police force and transit authority and trash collection agencies. He cut taxes and levies over and over, saving billions for taxpayers. He cut NYC’s top income-tax rate by 20.6%. Local city taxes on a family of four dropped 23.7%. He cut the commercial-rent tax. He cut sales taxes, including taxes on clothing. He cut the marriage penalty tax. He cut taxes on commercial rents and on small businesses and self-employed New Yorkers. He privatized municipal assets, selling city-owned radio and television stations and divested the City from the New York Coliseum adding $345 million to erase the City’s red ink. He cut NYC’s hotel tax from 6% to 5%. Tourism increased 50% in the city per year during Rudy’s tenure. Personal income increased 50%. Unemployment in the city went form 10.3% to 5.1%.

And that was only his conservative fiscal policy. He also reduced crime in NYC by 64%, the murder rate alone by 67%. He fired thousands of dead wood bureaucrats and used the money saved to put more cops on the beat. He shut down porn shops throughout the downtown tourist areas and kicked them out of residential neighborhoods. He went after drug lords—something unheard of in NYC. He also went after the welfare cheats, removing illegal recipients, cutting the outlay for welfare by 20%. Over 600,000 recipients were dropped from the roles. At the same time he began a work requirement program for remaining recipients. He ended the set-aside program for minority contractors, refused to meet with Al Sharpton, and otherwise refused to be cowed by racial politics. He refused to lower job requirements for minorities and women. He pushed to reform the city’s schools and supported school vouchers—another view that went against the liberal grain. Ditto his fight against using public money for anti-religious art displays. How is any of this liberal?

In all of this he was fought by the liberal media, beginning with the NYTimes. But he fought back and won, turning around a dying city with a population bigger than most states. Nor was he just successful as mayor. He was famous as a U.S. Attorney in the Reagan administration long before he became mayor, amassing more than 4,000 convictions, with only 25 reversals. He was constantly on the evening news for spectacular achievments: he broke the back of NY’s organized crime, for instance, bringing the five family heads of NY’s notorious Mob to trial and sending them away for long prison terms—at great risk to his own life. He went after Wall Street white collar criminals like insider trader Ivan Boesky and junk bond dealer Michael Milkin. And he destroyed NY’s notorious political machine, sending some of its most corrupt politicians to prison. He also prosecuted terrorists and illegal immigrants. All this was before his coolheaded leadership on 9/11 won the admiration of most Americans.

Sure he espoused liberal social causes like abortion and gun-control. But he was mayor of the most liberal city in America, not South Bend, IN—and even in this, his positions are not as extreme as the Rudy-bashers like to intimate. On abortion he has publicly promised he would appoint strict constructionists as judges—and strict constructionists like Ted Olson on backing him. That’s a huge concession and would effectively cancel out the effects of any personal liberal position he might hold. Personally, I’d trust him on this issue far more than I’d ever trust McCain or Thompson. And his position on gay rights and on gun control is to keep the federal government out of these issues and leave them to the local governments. Again, fine by me. On immigration, his view is the same as President Bush’s—he’s for a guest worker program. Nothing especially alarming about that—many good conservatives hold this view.

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