Posted on 04/06/2007 5:43:31 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani often enjoys poll scores above all presidential rivals from both sides of the political aisle. He inarguably projects the kind of appeal normally foreign to most candidates trying to convince voters that citizens matter more than a party’s agenda.
However, that likely centrist advantage in the general election can be kryptonite in the primaries because centrism has so often been antithetical to the ideologues selecting each party’s nominee. But things are changing and Giuliani’s tough stances in defense of moderate positions are continuously embraced by the respondents of all surveys. Republicans have begun demonstrating more acceptance of moderates than have the Democrats, and this is a dramatic shift.
While having parity with the loons of the Right in the 90’s, those on the Left have since morphed into greater episodes of unhinged behavior. Yes, the right-wingers have Ann Coulter. However, the leftovers have Rosie O’Donnell, and she has grown to equal six snapping Coulters.
Let us be candid in the way we measure their respective fringe-like behavior. Coulter wrongfully resorts to name-calling while O’Donnell likens Iran’s taking of 15 British sailor and marine hostages to a cabal arranged by the United States government. Apparently the Baker-Hamilton Commission was right all along when recommending diplomacy with Iraq’s surrounding hostile regimes possessing a vested interest in our demise. We need only talk with the Iranians and look how quickly they’ll kidnap on our behalf! By Rosie’s measure however, we’ll now appear to have lost our influence because President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad let them go – U.S. cabal neutralized.
Back in our own galaxy, hard right elephants are uncomfortable with Giuliani’s progressiveness despite respecting his globally witnessed 9/11 heroism – but they’re not as disquieted as the liberals would prefer. Hard-Left donkeys are paranoid that if he does win the primaries, his centrism will then be unleashed upon its most target rich audience, the general election voters.
This is reminiscent of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, who lost the state’s Democratic primary in ’06 only to win the statewide election thereafter as an independent. The militants rejected him while mainstreamers decisively returned him to power.
Why are the rigid partisans on both sides so frightened? Because even the wing-nuts have learned over the years that a preponderance of polling data illustrates that most Americans are socially moderate and fiscally conservative while being strong on national defense.
A more strangling frustration however will tighten around the Democrats because while the hierarchies of both camps are unnerved by centrists, a Giuliani victory would become a Bill Clinton moment for the GOP. Just as Bill extricated control of the Democratic Party from the far-Left, Rudy would take from the far-Right that similar influence. Republicans would accomplish in ‘08 the broader appeal once enjoyed by Democrats in the ‘90s. This of course was before they succumbed to the authoritarian collectivism of Moveon.org and the pro-Tiananmen Square massacre mentality of International ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism).
Mr. Giuliani will nonetheless encounter battles with his own party’s old guard, but it’s a healthy and necessary process. Social conservatives will never come around to his perspective on gay rights and abortion, but will continue admiring his law enforcement prowess, contempt for a legislative judiciary, and zealous advocacy for free trade. He’s also the only candidate who has spoken extensively on the dangers of crossing the separation of powers between the branches, and how Constitutional law outranks legislative law each and every time - regardless of whether or not it’s liked by Congress, the Supreme Court or the Executive Branch.
Yet these are cautionary challenges juxtaposed to the well-grounded nervousness felt by Democrats over Giuliani’s prowess. In a column entitled, “Democrats Should Go After Giuliani – NOW,” popular left-wing syndicated columnist Roland Martin recommends going after the pre- 9/11 Rudy:
He was accused of being grossly insensitive to the family of a black man shot numerous times by the police and his rudeness was the talk of City Hall. (Creators Syndicate, February 16, 2007.)
However, Martin later admits in that column:
There is no candidate that strikes fear in the hearts of Democrats more than Giuliani. He has mass appeal, can raise money, has a huge name I.D. and is strong on defense. He talks tough and walks even tougher.
A month later, a quasi-progressive magazine published an opinion piece by Robert Polner entitled, “What an anti-Giuliani add should say,” wherein he supports the need to emphasize the benefits of disparaging the Mayor’s 9/11 credentials just as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did in the 2004 election against Senator John Kerry’s military service. He argues that the Democrats should use the International Association of Fire Fighters’ drafted letter of rebuke:
It blasted Giuliani for his "disgraceful" order of November 2001 that forced hundreds of New York firefighters to stop searching ground zero for the remains of their fallen brethren. (Salon Magazine, March 17, 2007)
Somehow, this scheduling dispute pales when compared to the veteran-turned-activist’s own comments before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he characterized the confessed actions of a minority of soldiers as if they were the atrocities of most:
They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. (Government transcript of John Kerry’s testimony, April 22, 1971, courtesy of C-SPAN)
However, the country will soon see the benefits of Giuliani’s pre-9/11 record. During his tenure, crime dropped, employment rose, the economy strengthened, drug use plummeted, and Time Square stopped being the toilet everyone wanted to flush.
He accomplished what 40 years worth of predecessors could not – he allowed my city to radiate again with pride.
What did Rudy to PREVENT TERROR while Mayor?Well, he did locate a very expensive NYC emergency command post (complete with BU generators and thousands of pounds of fuel) INSIDE the World Trade Center. That made 911 response time very difficult for the FDNY and NYPD folks.
Afterwords he did other great stuff, like:
Angry archivists and historians denounced the unprecedented hijacking of public property to private hands. Tom Connors, of the Society of American Archivists, said the transfer seemed part of a movement to "create barriers to the American citizen's right to know what their governments are doing."
The families of the police and fire rescuers who died in the attack balked at Giuliani's plan to take up to a year to dole out the money, with his new organization billing $2.2 million in anticipated administrative expenses (including six-figure salaries for friends he appointed as officers). The families argued that the fire union had far more quickly distributed $111 million with an estimated administrative cost of just $30,000.
Under embarrassing pressure from the victims' families, unions and state Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, Giuliani backed down. He promised to distribute the money within 60 days and fund his overhead from new donations. The families of the deceased rescuers, the real heroes of the September 11 attacks, received a one-time benefit of about $230,000 each from the Giuliani-privatized fund in 2002. That year, the former mayor earned some $8 million in speaking fees alone, more than $650,000 per month.
New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three of the illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the INS.
On the issues: Liberal Party endorsement of Giuliani
National Review: Rockefeller quote
New York Observer: Reagan Republican quote
New York Observer: Republican convention quote
New York Observer: Goldwater quote
He is a retired engineer who worked on moon shots for Kodak (on the cameras).
He gives me endless hard time for being a rightwing extremist nutcase and sends me a lot of liberal emails just to irritate me.
Your parsing is getting so tiresome.
Let's take education, shall we?
At the end of Giuliani’s second term, the proportion of students able to pass the eighth-grade English test declined to 29 percent. The percentage of students passing this test dropped 6 percent over 4 years.
In the eighth-grade math test, only 29.7 percent of students met the state standard in 2001.
Graduation rates in high school dropped. Class size stagnated. It took months to repair broken windows. A 1999 report by the Board of Education said that more than half of the schools still weren’t connected to the Internet.
The Full Rudy, p. 38
Vouchers would be a terrible mistake because they would bleed the public schools of needed financing.
Rudy Giuliani New York Times, August 15, 1995
* * *
We’re going to see increased calls for privatization and for vouchers for private and parochial school education. Alternatives which in my view will weaken if not create the collapse of the New York City public school system…. I believe the voucher system in New York City would be very, very troublesome. Our system is so large that making that kind of transition would pose tremendous difficulties. Not to mention the constitutional and legal difficulties that would be entailed in providing tax relief and tax dollars for religious education.
Rudy Giuliani Speech to Wharton Club, New York Times, August 15, 1995
* * *
I wanted to know if he supports tuition tax credits and vouchers, which he doesn’t.
Sandra Feldman, President of N.Y.C. Teacher’s Union, 1993
* * *
Giuliani himself was on record as repeatedly opposing a voucher system. As a candidate in 1993, he had told United Federation of Teachers’ President Sandra Feldman that he believed vouchers were “unconstitutional.”
In May 1995, he told a UFT conference that “vouchers would bleed the public schools of needed funds.”
In a speech to the Wharton Club in August 1995, the mayor declared, “Vouchers would weaken, if not create the collapse of the New York City public-school system.”
But by January 1999, Giuliani, facing term limits, was seriously thinking about running for the Senate in 2000. His advisers and pollsters were telling him that if he switched his position on vouchers, it would help him with Catholic voters upstate, and the national Republican Party.
So he slipped a favorable reference to a voucher plan into his state of the city address that month.
According to Wayne Barrett’s definitive Giuliani biography, Rudy!, following this voucher’s reference, the mayor told an alarmed Crew, “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.”
The Full Rudy, pp. 52-53
So now what?
So your liberal brother worships Rudy and that means?
So I have, again, posted the liberalism on education that Rudy represents. What say you?
Spoken like a true liberal...No wonder that you're backing Rudy.
A totalitarian walks through life on the principle "rules are for thee but not for me - I'm from the master race!" - and this, and this only, is the true hallmark.I agree. That is Rudy, on his record. For example: Pro-Illegal Immigration
As Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics has pointed out, Rudy is an adherent of the same approach to illegal immigration that John McCain, Ted Kennedy, George Bush, and Harry Reid have championed:
"While McCain has taken heat for his support of comprehensive immigration reform, Rudy is every bit as pro-immigration as McCain - if not more so. On the O'Reilly Factor last week Giuliani argued for a "practical approach" to immigration and cited his efforts as Mayor of New York City to "regularize" illegal immigrants by providing them with access to city services like public education to "make their lives reasonable." Giuliani did say that "a tremendous amount of money should be put into the physical security" needed to stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming across the border, but his overall position on immigration is essentially indistinguishable from McCain's."
That's bad enough. But, as Michelle Malkin has revealed, under Giuliani, New York was an illegal alien sanctuary and "America's Mayor" actually sued the federal government in an effort to keep New York City employees from having to cooperate with the INS:
"When Congress enacted immigration reform laws that forbade local governments from barring employees from cooperating with the INS, Mayor Rudy Giuliani filed suit against the feds in 1997. He was rebuffed by two lower courts, which ruled that the sanctuary order amounted to special treatment for illegal aliens and were nothing more than an unlawful effort to flaunt federal enforcement efforts against illegal aliens. In January 2000, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, but Giuliani vowed to ignore the law."
If you agree with the way that Nancy Pelosi and Company deal with illegal immigration, then you'll find the way that Rudy Giuliani tackles the issue to be right down your alley.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF GIULIANI'S LEFT-WING POLITICAL POSITIONS
Well done, thank you!
I have members of my family that have lived under Rudy’s tyranny. They hate him and they are die-hard conservatives.
Murder and rape are impossible to end. Does that mean we shouldn't pass laws to try and deter it?
And, yes, outlawing and restricting abortion through the law will do more to reduce abortion than anything else.
Moreoever, this is Constitutional issue. The people should be deciding what the laws should be in regard to abortion, not dictatorial judges legislating from the bench. Conservatives get that even if RINO Rudy doesn't.
Tell that to tkathy, her uber-liberal brother LOVES Rooty.
That means that voters from the left also worship at the alter. :)
That olive oil gets really messy. Judy hates washing it out of his rainments.
Now THAT is funny. :)
So, are moderates/liberals promoting RINOs on a conservative website.
Rudy is exactly that guy. Examine his record in NYC ... he actually does have a record beyond rhetoric.
So what? The country could withstand 4-8 years more of illegal immigration. What it could not withstand is 4-8 years of hillary.
“There must be public funding for abortions for poor women. We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decisions about abortion.” -- Rudolph Giuliani, 1989.
Further, he openly opposed any restriction on public funding of abortion as mayor of New York:
Leaflets distributed by the Giuliani campaign .... said that he opposes restrictions to Federal Medicaid financing for abortions and opposes the Hyde Amendment, which is intended to deny support for that financing. New York Times, June 18, 1993.
The Clintonesque spins aren't going to work here.
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