Rudy Giuliani is a conservative. In fact, it's my contention that despite some shortcomings, he is the best example today of a results-oriented, conservative executive.
Giuliani demonstrated that in his own words: "the social contract is reciprocal. For every right there's an obligation, for every privilege there's a duty." His policies drove down crime, reduced abortions, scaled back government regulations and taxes, and ended racial preferences. The number of people on welfare fell dramatically under his tenure.
Long before Giuliani emerged from the ashes of Sept. 11 to be crowned "America's Mayor" and "Person of the Year," he was a fighter. And Giuliani isn't just full of rhetoric; he acts on his conservative instincts. City Journal recently published an article titled "Yes, Rudy Giuliani Is a Conservative."
The author, Steven Malanga, noted, "As mayor, he took the high moral ground in the terrorism debate in 1995, when he had an uninvited Yasser Arafat expelled from city-sponsored celebrations during the United Nations' 50th anniversary because, in Mr. Giuliani's eyes, Arafat was a terrorist, not a world leader. 'When we're having a party and a celebration, I would rather not have someone who has been implicated in the murders of Americans there, if I have the discretion not to have him there,' Mr. Giuliani said at the time."
Giuliani recognized that as a leader, you can't appeal to every constituent. You have to run on who you are, and your beliefs, and ultimately the voters will judge you on that.
Giuliani described this phenomenon in his book, Leadership: "a leader who fails to act until every group has been heard is a leader who's abdicating his responsibility." Ironically, it is perhaps this attitude of his that has endeared him most to the Republican base. They know they don't agree with Giuliani on every issue - but they respect him for being honest (and not a flip-flopper). Perhaps more importantly, Giuliani isn't running as a liberal insurgent challenging the core conservative base of the Republicans as John McCain did in 2000. He's running on his leadership as mayor of New York and on his handling of Sept. 11. And conservatives are ready to admit that, as Ronald Reagan said, "my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy."
Moreover, Republicans fundamentally believe the global war on terror is for real. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, conservatives recognize that the other issues - abortion, gun control, etc. - don't matter much if we're all dead.
Giuliani has a conservative worldview. As Steven Malanga noted in City Journal, "Far from being a liberal, he ran New York with a conservative's priorities." Government exists above all to keep people safe in their homes and in the streets, he said, not to redistribute income, run a welfare state, or perform social engineering. The private economy, not government, creates opportunity, he argued; government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector's way. He denied that cities and their citizens were victims of vast forces outside their control, and he urged New Yorkers to take personal responsibility for their lives."
Giuliani has a record he can run on. Unlike McCain, his main rival for the Republican nomination, or his Democratic counterparts Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, or John Edwards, he is not a product of the U.S. Two years ago, I wrote a column, "NYC crime rate cut with penalties," in which I detailed the success of Rudy Giuliani's robust policing where homicides fell by 67 percent under his leadership. Abortions dropped 16.9 percent during his reign, the foster care population fell 38 percent as over 17,000 children were adopted, 17 charter schools were established, and over 20 percent of taxes where slashed, saving the tax payers over $9.8 billion. These are a few of the tangible results Giuliani accomplished as mayor.
Giuliani now has a majority of both conservative and moderate Republicans supporting his bid for president, and has as much as 58 percent of the GOP primary vote locked up according to one recent Newsweek poll. Some of these numbers may be driven solely by name recognition; others might be driven by his leadership on Sept. 11; still others might be salivating at the thought of trouncing the Democrats at the polls in November 2008 (Giuliani wins in a match up among any of the current Democratic contenders).
The reason, however, Giuliani will probably be the Republican nominee for president, is that he is the right man in these times for the job. To quote John Derbyshire of National Review, "a great many of us seem to have had enough of the softer, feminized, kumbaya approach to matters both domestic and foreign." Go get 'em, Giuliani.
Kevin Boland is a Heights staff columnist. He welcomes comments at bolandk@bcheights.com.
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