Free Republic

February 13, 2007 Giuliani Expects Key Mass. GOP Endorsements Massachusetts Republicans may spoil Mitt Romney’s party this week. Ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani is set to score a coup with endorsements from 2 and perhaps a third of the 5 Bay State Republican state senators. Credit for the Giuliani coup goes to former governor Paul Cellucci, who’s been working to snag members of the tiny Republican caucus. Sources said that Senate minority leader Richard Tesei to endorse Giuliani. Tesei, a Wakefield Republican, is in his first term as leader. Insiders think the only way to increase their numbers (or avoid obliteration)...

New York, Feb 13 - In a sign of continuing momentum, the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Exploratory Committee today announced Congressman David Dreier, Chairman of the California Republican Congressional Delegation and House Rules Committee Ranking Republican, has announced his support for Mayor Rudy Giuliani to be the next President of the United States. Dreier’s endorsement follows the rousing reception Mayor Giuliani received at the California State Republican Convention and his successful swing through the state. Dreier will help lead Mayor Giuliani’s exploratory committee efforts in California. Congressman Dreier said, “America needs the proven leadership of Rudy Giuliani to tackle the difficult...

Is Giuliani a conservative? He might just be Last week C-SPAN featured a discussion about Rudolph Giuliani that left me shaking my head. The gist of the guest's message was that Giuliani was a "Rockefeller Republican" who was suddenly transformed into a darling of conservatives after 9/11. Today, Fox News echoed the same theme. That's quite wrong. Social conservatives have trouble with Giuliani, but by no stretch of the imagination is he a Rockefeller (i.e. liberal) Republican. In fact, in many ways Giuliani is the most conservative of the top three candidates for the Republican nomination. He came by that...

The book on Rudy Giuliani is that he is too liberal on social issues to win the Republican presidential nomination. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, put it succinctly: "I don't see anyone getting the Republican nomination who is not pro-life and a staunch defender of traditional marriage." But Mr. Giuliani is running strong in Iowa and New Hampshire polls and leading most national surveys of Republicans. He's charming crowds of conservatives everywhere he goes. So it's worth wondering if Mr. Perkins is missing an undercurrent coursing through conservative politics. Republicans have just experienced a bruising midterm election...

New York City before Rudy was an aging courtesan. Visiting New York City was a trip to a third-world country that had become so by choice. Times-Square was disgusting . . . full of the sort of raunchy shops that the morally stunted think are adult. Much of the city smelled of urine and I could hear gun shots in the distance walking back to my rooms . . . not once but often in my short trips to pre-Rudy New York. It was obvious why people stayed in New York City, even loved her, but it was a dying,...

While the White House is taking a hands-off approach to the 2008 GOP presidential primaries so far, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is quietly seeing an administration cheerleading section grow. One insider said that it is built on the fact that Giuliani continues to beat Sen. John McCain in the polls and also because he is offering to stick with several Bush programs, including an aggressive stance against terrorists, and promises to name conservative judges to the court. One Bush official today noted Giuliani's pledge to nominate conservative judges and applauded the New Yorker for making that claim in...

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, still basking in his can-do post-Sept. 11 image, got a rousing welcome yesterday from Republican activists searching for a presidential candidate who can win in California. No Republican presidential candidate has carried California since the elder George Bush did in 1988, and no one has even run a competitive race in the increasingly Democratic-leaning state since then. Republicans are hopeful they have prospects in the large 2008 field who can reverse the trend by combining liberal and conservative stands that has proven so successful for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The popularity of the governor shows...

The book on Rudy Giuliani is that he is too liberal on social issues to win the Republican presidential nomination. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, put it succinctly: "I don't see anyone getting the Republican nomination who is not pro-life and a staunch defender of traditional marriage." But Mr. Giuliani is running strong in Iowa and New Hampshire polls and leading most national surveys of Republicans. He's charming crowds of conservatives everywhere he goes. So it's worth wondering if Mr. Perkins is missing an undercurrent coursing through conservative politics. Republicans have just experienced a bruising midterm election...

Nobody can discredit the talent, skill and sheer genius of Frank Sinatra. Emerging onto the music scene in 1935, the hoodlum from Hoboken went from the marketplace to the marquee. For six decades this musical rock of Gibraltar wooed audiences from Jersey to Japan, Connecticut to Cambodia. He was a living legend. But like most legends, Sinatra had an Achilles heel. While drugs, alcohol and cigarettes may be addictive, the spotlight is down right infectious, and when one has occupied the spotlight for decades, it is pretty much impossible to vacate it. Sinatra, even though a maverick of music, fell...

Views of Giuliani put GOP to the test His moderate stands on social issues part with conservative base .......On the first day of his five-day California swing, a blog popular with state conservatives, Flash Report.org, posted a YouTube clip from a February 2000 Meet the Press in which Giuliani boasts that no public official in the nation is "more strongly pro-immigrant than I am." For conservatives who want a president who will crack down on illegal immigration, that sort of talk is very troubling. "That's a big mistake," said Linda Sutter, 50, of Crescent City, Calif., who supports Giuliani because...

MANCHESTER, N.H. - New Hampshire residents likely to vote in the Republican presidential primary a year from now think more highly of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani than any of his rivals, a poll released Tuesday shows. ADVERTISEMENT Giuliani's net favorability rating — the proportion of people viewing him favorably minus the proportion viewing him unfavorably — was 56 percent, well ahead of Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), 32 percent, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 26 percent, in the University of New Hampshire poll for WMUR-TV in Manchester."He's the lesser-known candidate, but he has that rock...

Today Peggy Noonan makes a glancing reference to something I've been meaning to write about for a while with respect to Rudy Giuliani: On 9/10/01 he was a bum, on 9/11 he was a man, and on 9/12 he was a hero. Life can change, shift, upend in an instant. Noonan is over dramatizing for effect, of course, but a while back I got an email from a self-described liberal in NYC saying much the same thing - namely, that in the mythical afterglow of Rudy's performance on 9/11 people have forgotten that (to paraphrase my emailer's formulation) "on September...

[snip] Giuliani transformed a city whose budget and workforce were larger than those of all but five or six states. He and police chief William Bratton famously cracked down first on quality of life crimes like panhandling and public urination. Teenagers who leaped over the turnstiles at subway entrances were arrested — a departure from the practice under Mayor David Dinkins. Giuliani later quipped that the police under his predecessor had become "highly skilled observers of crime." Those turnstile jumpers turned out to possess a huge number of illegal guns, which were confiscated, and criminals throughout the city discovered that...

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has led the field for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination in most polls of GOP voters. His popularity among the party’s mainly conservative base is founded on his image of standing tall and reassuring New Yorkers following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on their city, though some voters also know him for his tough-on-crime persona and efforts to rein in government spending. But there are aspects of Giuliani’s record; his views, especially on volatile social issues; and his personal past that do not thrill conservative activists. In fact, some are inalterably opposed to...

WASHINGTON -- Eager to head off Rudolph Giuliani's recent gains in the polls, conservative activists this week strengthened their attacks, with some promising to step up their efforts on the Internet, talk radio and "below-the-radar" to discredit him going forward. They are taking direct aim at one of Giuliani's strongest selling points, at least to some backers -- that he is the Republicans' best hope of stopping Hillary Rodham Clinton. These critics argue that his nomination would prompt a conservative third-party candidate to join the race and split the GOP vote, clearing the way for Clinton's election. "There's no way...

Rudy Giuliani's announcement that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination brings to my mind a book I wrote in the early 1990s, "The Conservative Crack-Up." When I wrote the book, Ronald Reagan's successor, President George H. W. Bush, was ignoring many of the constituent ingredients of the Reagan Revolution, for instance, tax cuts. The various factions of the conservative coalition were disgruntled and threatening to take a walk. Once again liberal pundits were diagnosing the conservative movement as moribund. Ever since the conservative movement's ascendancy within the Republican Party in 1964, these grim diagnoses have been handed down episodically....