Free Republic

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....

While Rudy Giuliani is known as "America's Mayor" for his leadership in the weeks following September 11, what has been overshadowed is how he brought accountability and competency to New York's dysfunctional city government during the prior seven years. The best known turnaround story of the Giuliani era is the 65% plunge in serious crime. By restructuring the NYPD and focusing its resources on the neighborhoods that needed them the most via the famous Compstat system, the poorest neighborhoods saw the greatest reduction in crime and improvement in quality of life. 'snip' Rudy could be considered the original "compassionate conservative"...