Republican '08 options disappoint evangelicals (Land: would vote for Hillary over Rudy)

***... Mr. Giuliani maintains a big lead over his Republican rivals in the polls yet has all the wrong policy positions on social issues such as abortion and homosexual rights considered key to cultivating Christian conservatives. However, some evangelicals and pro-life Catholics seem willing to overlook his faults -- including his two divorces -- in the belief that he is the only Republican actually running who can defeat the Democratic nominee in 2008.

Still, Mr. Giuliani and conservative Christians "probably have irreconcilable differences on life and family and that kind of thing," said Mr. Falwell, adding, "I couldn't support him for president."

"I do not believe that the current excitement over Giuliani will continue," Mr. Dobson told U.S. News & World Report.

Richard Land, president of the Religious and Ethics Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, takes a hard line against virtually all the major Republican candidates. He says he'd vote for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, over Mr. Giuliani if the 2008 presidential race came down to such a choice. And if Mr. Giuliani wins, "he'll do so without social conservatives," Mr. Land said. .....

Anything here you like?

******......“People talk about how ‘New York’ Rudy’s image is, but the whole gist of Giuliani’s policies was to make New York more like the rest of America,” Fred Siegel said in an interview last month. Siegel is a professor at the Cooper Union in New York and the author of the indispensable book on Giuliani’s mayoralty, The Prince of the City. “He wanted to open the city up. He wanted to make it what it used to be—a city of aspiration. He wanted to let people in poverty and the lower middle class rise up. He wanted the kind of dynamic economy you associate with the rest of the country.”

Siegel’s book offers a useful reminder of how revolutionary this ambition was in the city that Giuliani inherited in 1993. The intense idiocy of New York’s pre-Giuliani political culture, formed by a half century of unchallenged leftism among the city’s rich and powerful, survives today only in an attenuated form, mostly on the editorial page of the New York Times, and it is hard to reimagine in hindsight. Public unions held city services hostage to their escalating demands for gold-bricking work rules. Welfare caseworkers were judged by how many people they retained on welfare rather than how many they moved into the world of work. Politicians lived in fear of racial blackmail. The decadence was thoroughgoing—an intellectual collapse as well as a failure of political will. Once in the 1970s, for example, when citizens complained about vandalism in the city’s parks, the parks commissioner replied that vandalism was “simply a way in which certain elements of my constituency use the parks. Some people like to sit on benches, others like to tear them up.” Every city was bedeviled by graffiti in the 1970s and 1980s; only New York indulged a highly credentialed elite that argued that graffiti was an artistic activity worth preserving and emulating.

“The economic energy which has always defined the city shifted away from economic pursuits into exhibitionism and violence,” Siegel writes. This was the New York of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, “where the sky glowed as if inflamed by fever,” and most observers assumed the city’s downward course was irreversible. By the time Giuliani took office, a poll showed that more than 50 percent of New Yorkers hoped to leave the city for good. It was only because of these “emergency conditions,” as Siegel calls them, that the city resorted to the extremity of electing a Republican. The next eight years saw, in George Will’s words, “the most successful episode of conservative governance in this country in the last fifty years.”

Yet Giuliani’s conservatism was a uniquely New York artifact, just as the fever from which he rescued his city was singular and without parallel anywhere else. He cut taxes but taxes remained high. He reduced red tape but the city’s regulatory apparatus remained vast. He reduced the rate of growth in government spending to close a budget deficit, but by the end of his mayoralty the deficit had reopened and grown larger than the one he originally faced. Mostly his program, and the source of his success, involved the reapplication of common sense principles that only New Yorkers, alone among the country at large, had been stupid enough to forget so thoroughly: Personal safety and civic order are preconditions of any kind of progress; work is better than welfare; lower taxes encourage economic activity; small crimes lead to big crimes, and crime of any kind deserves punishment; sex shops are antisocial disruptions of neighborhood life. And graffiti, by God, isn’t art. To paraphrase Cindy Adams, only in New York, kids, would such truisms come as a revelation, much less appear to be a right-wing agenda.

Giuliani cites his triumph in New York in the 1990s—along with the sensitive and courageous performance of his duties during the chaos of September 11, 2001—as his chief qualification for the presidency. Yet voters will be entitled to wonder whether the triumph is transplantable to a different time, on a different scale, in a much larger, two-party political culture that is not nearly so irrational and self-destructive as New York City’s. The personal temperament and “management style” he displayed as mayor, not unusual for New York, are hard to imagine in the Oval Office. “People didn’t elect me to be a conciliator,” he told Time magazine at the end of his second term. “If they just wanted a nice guy they would have stayed with [David Dinkins, his feckless predecessor]. They wanted someone who was going to change this place. How do you expect me to change it if I don’t fight with somebody? You don’t change ingrained human behavior without confrontation, turmoil, anger.”

How would such a rough-edged approach appeal to those moderation-loving centrists who, Giuliani supporters claim, the candidate will attract to the Republican party in uncountable numbers? Even in New York his public personality wore thin. Three months before the end of his term Giuliani’s poll ratings had fallen to George W. Bush-like levels—only one in three New Yorkers approved of his performance. The dip followed an excruciating personal difficulty that Giuliani himself thrust into public view. In early 2000, at a press conference on an unrelated matter, Giuliani suddenly announced to the assembled reporters that he was divorcing his second wife. The second wife, for her part, held a press conference of her own a few hours later to announce that the mayor’s announcement was the first she’d heard of any divorce. She couldn’t have been terribly surprised, though. By this time, the mayor had abandoned his official residence, moved in with friends, and taken to appearing at public functions with another woman, Judi Nathan, whom he would eventually marry three years later. The second wife and their two children were left to themselves in the mayor’s mansion. The kids were 14 and 10 at the time. It’s not necessary to imagine what all those moderation-loving centrists will make of this episode; just imagine what a Democratic ad-maker will make of it.

The question of temperament is particularly pertinent given the great stress Giuliani’s supporters place on his possible leadership in the war on terror. Every activist I spoke with at CPAC who supported Giuliani told me they did so because of their certainty that when it comes to America’s jihadist enemies, the former mayor will, in the words of one eager young CPAC delegate, “kick butt and take names.” And kill them, too, presumably. It would be a great irony—and perfectly in keeping with the traditional illogic of Republican electoral strategies—if Republicans determined that foreign policy was the premiere issue in the 2008 election and then nominated a candidate who, like Giuliani, has no official foreign policy experience at all.

Giuliani spends a good deal of every stump speech stressing the need for America “to stay on offense” in the war on terror. His precise conception of that war, and his approach to foreign affairs in general, is harder to pin down. To the extent that he’s amplified his view of the terror war, it seems much closer to the economic determinism of the moderate realist school than to the notorious butt-kicking strategy of the neoconservative warrior class. Indeed, he says the “war on terror” is itself a misnomer; he prefers the term “the terrorists’ war on us,” which does sound rather more defensive.

“Americans hate war,” he recently told the Churchill Club, a gathering of Silicon Valley executives. “We’re at war because they want to come here and kill us, not because we want to go there and kill them. We want to do business with them. We would love to have them all wired and part of the Internet buying American products, and then we’ll buy their products. And then we’ll have the kind of issues we have with China and India, like we used to have with Japan. But those are good issues to have. That’s America, that’s what America is about.”

In the end, he says, victory in the terror war may come down to commerce. “Technology has transformed the world,” he told the executives. “Part of the way we’re ultimately going to win the war on terror is through that technology. We’re going to win the war on terror because, yes, we have to be militarily strong, we have to consider defending ourselves, but ultimately we overcome terrorism when those parts of the world that haven’t connected yet connect to the global economy.”

Consider China, he said. “China has plugged in. It’s still a dictatorship, and they have to overcome that. But they’ve plugged into the global economy. If you think of where the terrorists are coming from, those are places that haven’t plugged in. Ultimately economic freedom pushes you to political freedom. . . . We need to be strong, we need to be determined, but we also need to connect as many of these [Middle Eastern] countries as possible to doing business with us, to being connected to the Internet with us.”

Kick butt, take names, and then make sure they have hotmail accounts.

San Francisco
No gun nuts here! Probably not in all of San Francisco, I’ll bet, and certainly not at this Giuliani fundraiser, in a lemony suite of rooms at the Four Seasons hotel downtown. Fifty or so wealthy Northern Californians have paid $2,300 apiece, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, to sip sauvignon blanc, nibble on finger food, and hear Giuliani give an extended version of his stump speech. The sun is setting beyond the veranda outside, and a bay breeze twists the chiffon curtains ceilingward. Bejeweled women teeter across the plush carpet in spike heels. They’re held upright by husbands in linen sport coats and open-necked shirts, most of them a head shorter than the wives. And the finger food is—simply—fabulous—I’m sorry but there’s no other word for the tissue-thin ovals of sliced venison tenderloin and the tiny hillocks of baby spring vegetables tossed in an emulsion of wasabi pesto. More than a continent separates these people from CPAC.

And it’s a different Giuliani, too. This crowd is less boisterous, but Giuliani is more animated, even though it’s the end of a long day of travel and schmoozing. For the first 20 minutes he stands between two flagpoles while the donors are escorted into his presence for photos. He grips and grins and then back-slaps them on their way, seldom shifting from that Ed Sullivan shoulder-hunch posture of his—as though he had forgotten to remove the coat hanger when he slipped on his suit this morning.

“Did he say anything to you?” one donor asks another after he’s come from the photo line.

“Not really,” says the friend. “It was kind of perfunctory.”

“Better than Schwarzenegger, though,” says the first man. “Arnold won’t even look at you!”

When the photos are through Giuliani waits patiently, hands folded in front of him, through a long introduction from the Stanford economist and business consultant Michael Boskin. Boskin says the coming presidential election is the most consequential since 1980, but he mentions the “threat of Islamic terrorism” only briefly. What has really brought him to the Giuliani camp, he says, is his worry over “what kind of economy this nation is going to bequeath to our children.”

“I don’t want to wake up some morning down the road,” Boskin says, “to the kind of economy they have in Western Europe—no jobs, no opportunity—and have our children ask us, ‘How did you let this happen?’” (Where were you when they raised the capital gains tax rate, Daddy?)

Boskin’s introduction is a nice reminder of one of the most striking things about Giuliani’s campaign pitch: He is, rhetorically at least, the most economically libertarian presidential candidate since the doomed campaign of Phil Gramm. Most remarkable of all, he wraps his message of economic freedom in the same unyielding moralism that rattled New Yorkers.

“Maybe the thing I worked on the most in New York,” he tells the San Franciscans, “was to get New Yorkers to reestablish the idea of personal responsibility.” For generations, he says, New York’s comprehensive welfare system had operated on the idea of collective responsibility. “We were dramatically breaking down the work ethic,” he says. So he put the city’s welfare population to work. The New York Times called him a fascist. But venturing into the neighborhoods, he would tell welfare recipients: “’I love you more. I care about you as if you were my brother or sister. I want you to work and have a job.’ . . . And so at the grassroots, we rebuilt the idea of personal responsibility rather than collective responsibility.”

Nationally, he said, the same astringent process was called for. “Our legal system is out of control. Democrats want to create a legal philosophy of collective responsibility. Every injury, every thing that goes on, there’s no individual responsibility. There’s no risk in society. Invest in a stock, it goes up, you get the profit. It goes down, you lose money, you sue your investment adviser.”

The men in linen sports coats chuckled, collectively.

“It’s a no-risk society,” Giuliani went on. “If we continue with this idea of collective responsibility, we’ll become a society that deteriorates. And it’s a battle that has to be fought now.”

He offers health care as an example. “Democrats want universal health care, collective responsibility—honestly, it’s their version of socialized medicine.” Even the recent health care reform in Massachusetts, designed by the Republican governor Mitt Romney, was tainted with collectivity, because it required every citizen to get health insurance.

“I don’t like mandates,” Giuliani says. “I don’t like mandating health care. I don’t like it because it erodes what makes health care work in this country—the free market, the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We’ve got to let people make choices. We’ve got to let them take the risk—do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because ultimately, if they don’t, well, then, they may not be taken care of. I suppose that’s difficult.” He lets the idea sink in, though it seems to bother his audience not at all. “The minute you start mandating, you always end up with more expensive government programs.”

Of course, moralism has its limits. During the question and answer session, a well-tanned Republican worried aloud about the coming primaries—”which tend,” he said, with some distaste, “to turn out more of the Republican base. I mean, how do you see yourself getting through issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion?”

“On some of those issues,” says Giuliani, “I may not agree with some parts of our party. But the differences may not be as great as some of our adversaries say.”

In recent weeks Giuliani has tried to mollify social-issue conservatives by saying that as president he would appoint only “strict constructionist” judges—”who interpret the law and don’t write it.” It’s an elastic phrase, widely understood to be a kind of code, and in a brief interview before the fundraiser, sitting in a suite on the top floor of the Four Seasons, I asked the candidate about it. Most people who call themselves strict constructionists, I said, would overturn
Roe v. Wade. Did he himself, as a strict constructionist, think Roe was wrongly decided?

“What I mean by a ‘strict constructionist judge’ has to do with my whole view of the Constitution,” he said, choosing not to answer directly. “A judge should try to figure out what other people meant—the Framers, Congress—when they wrote the words they wrote. If a judge starts from that premise, then we have a system of laws and not of whim. And I think starting back in the sixties, we had courts doing what legislatures should be doing, the Warren Court and all that. There’s a real debate about some of the criminal justice decisions—the exclusionary rule, for example.”

Did you think the court overreached in imposing the exclusionary rule, I asked.

“Some people will argue it did,” he said. “But with Roe—a strict constructionist judge could come to either conclusion about Roe v. Wade. He could come to the conclusion that it was incorrectly decided, overturn it, or he could decide well, it’s been precedent for so long now, it would be too disruptive to overturn it, so we leave it alone. I would leave that up to a judge.”

Back in the fundraiser downstairs, he amplified the point.

“I think it’s a bad thing in government when we start to play judges of morality,” he told the donors. “My concern in government was crime. Morality is a concern of families, of churches and religious leaders. My thing is, you break the law, you go to jail. But morality—I have mine, you have yours. I can talk to you about it, but I’m not going to enforce it.

“As for abortion, I think it’s wrong. However, people ultimately have to make that choice. If a woman chooses that, that’s her choice, not mine. That’s her morality, not mine.”

It was an interesting platform that Giuliani offered his audience—and that he intends to set before voters as the campaign progresses. He spoke of reforming Medicaid spending by giving vouchers to the poor. He suggested rebuilding the No Child Left Behind school reform by giving vouchers for parents to choose schools among private and public options. He endorsed a government-sponsored,
NASA-like program to develop alternative sources of energy. Americans, he said, should have the choice of accepting the
Social Security system or opening a private account instead. At the same time he suggested strengthening electronic provisions of the Patriot Act, and supporting “tough, intense interrogation” techniques against terrorists. Add the endorsement of gay rights and abortion rights, and it’s an unusual stew.

Giuliani is routinely described, in the pundit’s shorthand, as a moderate, and Fred Siegel, the Cooper Union scholar, coined the term “immoderate centrism” to describe Giuliani’s politics. But watching the mayor lay out his views you begin to see that Siegel’s term is only half correct. Giuliani’s not a centrist at all. He’s that rare politician who’s most comfortable staking out positions at the further points of the ideological spectrum, swinging from one end to the other depending on the issue at hand, and passing over the middle altogether. Rather than appeal to the “center,” as his supporters claim, it is just as likely that Giuliani’s social liberalism will offend conservatives and his fiscal conservatism will offend liberals.

These wealthy California Republicans weren’t offended at all, however. From their glow of satisfaction it was clear that they had found their candidate, as will every voter who is at once pro-choice and pro-war, pro-gay rights and pro-Patriot Act, against guns and in favor of privatizing Social Security.

There were 50 such people at least at the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco last month. Giuliani will soon discover how many more he can find elsewhere.***

http://news.yahoo.com/s/weeklystandard/20070403/cm_weeklystandard/theunlikelyfrontrunner

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