All I'm saying is that you have no credibility with me if you think GWB was a great president. He was an awful president -- which is why he was less popular than a child molester among American voters by the time he left office.
And if you got on the Giuliani bandwagon after GWB, then I suspect you live in a major urban center (probably NYC) and think a big, nanny-state, globalist government that orders people around like a herd of sheep is just fine. That's your business, but that ain't America.
Focus. We are discussing how and why people, especially Orthodox Jewish people such as myself, switch. First, get your chronology straight. Giuliani was elected while Clinton was President, not GWB. Second, we are not talking about the present perception of GWB, but at how he impressed people in 2000 and again in 2004, when he won a second term. Furthermore, at the time that I voted for Giuliani, I was a resident of NYC, not a passive observer of him from afar.
How GWB looked when he left office, or how people viewed Giuliani outside of NYC is irrelevant. He was a great mayor of NYC, because he lowered the annual body count from 2000 plus murdered in NYC to to 350 or so, balanced the budget, made the streets safe again. Nanny state shmanny state. He was the right man for NYC, long before 9/11/01, just as GWB was the right man for the country in 2001.
I’m sure in Alberta they have competent history teachers, who admonish their students about viewing historical characters in hindsight. For example, Churchill was a great wartime PM, but he was put out to pasture until 1940, and deservedly so, and was voted out of office in 1945, then voted back in a few years later, and kept on long after he was physically unable to function. If all you know of Churchill was how bravely he defied the German war machine in 1939 et seq., those facts are incomprehensible. But he was exactly the right man for 1940, and exactly the wrong man for 1945, as far as the voters were concerned.
So, too, GWB was exactly right for his time, then fell out of favor. Rudy Giuliani was exactly right for his time and place, but would have been an awful governor of Alberta in 1920.