Republicans getting hjacked again?
The striking question about Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination is this: Have the Republican voters lost their minds?
Twenty seven percent of Republicans favor Giuliani, placing him head of Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who stands with 21 percent , according to a recent Fox News poll. A New York Times poll puts Giuliani’s lead at 36 to 22. Sure, Giuliani’s candidacy could be difficult for the Dems to tackle. After all he was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 2001, and presumably some Republicans think he is the best competitor to Hillary Clinton – perhaps the primary reason for his support from conservatives.
But mostly, Giuliani’s candidacy does not look like a conservative Republican at all.
An example:
-- After the 9/11 attack, Giuliani threatened a lawsuit to challenge the mayoral term limits so he could continue as mayor of New York. Term limits of government officials has been a core plank of the Republican Party for several years.
-- During his 1999 bid for U.S. Senate, he admitted to his marital infidelity. That cannot sit well with conservative evangelicals.
-- In 2000, Giuliani announced the city was going to file lawsuits against two dozen major gun manufacturers and distributors. “This lawsuit is meant to end the free pass that the gun industry has so long enjoyed," Giuliani said at the time. Do the muckety mucks of the NRA know about this guy?
-- In 1998, as NY mayor, Giuliani pushed the city council to codify local law by granting all city employees equal benefits for their “domestic” partners, meaning homosexual partners. Giuliani also allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly in his administration.
And then there’s the big issue to Repubs: Abortion. Giuliani has been very open about his pro-choice stand. In his campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Senate in 2000, Giuliani said he supported then President Clinton’s veto of legislation making partial birth abortions illegal. While most Americans are pro-choice, Giuliani’s stand should not curry favor with conservative voters who see it as a good vs. evil issue.
Giuliani has not only been pro-choice, but advocated lawsuits against big business, openly promoted illegal immigration, and who admitted under oath he promoted to city Corrections Director and man with mob connections and who later pleaded guilty to corruption charges.
Is this Republicanism? Well, just when I thought I understood the “new” conservatives (now labeled “neo-cons”) the party of the religious right has Giuliani leading the pack. Just when I’d started to acquiesce to the notion the Bill O’Reilly-created “culture” war was real, Rudy Giuliani – the pro-choice candidate – is leading the Republican Party candidates. But it doesn’t stop there. The Repubs are seriously considering nominating a guy whose moral barometer is a lot farther left of Bill Clinton than Ken Starr ever imagined.
Giuliani divorced his first wife who was his second cousin (no more Arkansas jokes about that, my friends); openly had an affair with a staff member; told people he believed it was in good Italian tradition to maintain a mistress (according to this month’s Vanity Fair article on him), and fired his police chief because the guy got more publicity than the NY mayor. He’s also known among NY political insiders as being a ruthless control freak who is willing to step on anyone’s toes to assert his authority.
Everyone likes to say the proof is in the pudding, which I think means you judge someone by their actions and behaviors. How do we judge Giuliani? Well, a recent poll said we don’t know how to judge him, at least we don’t know where he is in the political spectrum. More than one-third polled considered him a moderate. Fifteen percent actually called him “liberal”. An amazing 20 percent had no clue.
However, there is some indication that some conservatives voters are catching on. In the NY Times poll of Republican voters, half said Giuliani did not share the same values as the Republican Party. Those voters are also unhappy with their candidate selection in general, with only 38 percent of Republican voters saying they are satisfied with their field of candidates. That compares to 63 percent of Democrats who said they were satisfied with the Democratic Party candidates.
Come on my conservative friends, stop this. You may think Giuliani has a better chance of beating a Clinton, but if you don’t watch out you’re going to be putting in the White House a man whose reading on the Republican litmus test is more acidic than even Hillary. More likely, though, you’re just going to be nominating a guy so out of step with the party that a greater number of conservatives will stay home from the polls and we will all be welcoming “Madam President.”
