Dan
Calabrese
Read Dan's bio and previous columns here
November 1, 2007
Rudy Giuliani is a
Conservative, Whether Purists Believe It or Not
If you want to test a conservative, put him in charge of New York City.
If he can make it there (this is not your cue to sing), one suspects he
can handle an assortment of infantile conservative activists.
And we’ll soon see, because said infantile activists – not Hillary
Clinton – appear to be Rudy Giuliani’s primary obstacle to the
presidency.
Giuliani is a conservative, a pragmatist and a politician. This
separates him from Republican rivals Fred Thompson and John McCain only
in the sense that Giuliani has actually had the task of governing
something – and that something was a very large and very liberal place.
Giuliani’s achievements of conservative governance in one of the world’s
largest liberal meccas are of almost heroic proportions. These
achievements would have been impossible if not for the fact that
Giuliani is also a pragmatist, which is not to be confused with what
rock-ribbed conservative ideologues refer to as a squish. A squish is a
moderate – someone who caves to liberal pressure for no reason other
than lack of conviction and inability to stand the heat. A pragmatist is
a smart politician who knows how to pick the right battles, forge the
right alliances, choose the right times to compromise and use all this
to achieve your big objectives.
Giuliani’s conservative priorities were tax cuts, spending restraint,
deregulation and law enforcement. In 1993, he took over a city that had
just enacted a massive tax increase, and in which spending was through
the roof, red tape was forcing businesses to relocate and crime was out
of control. Giuliani insisted on cutting taxes, and when the liberal
city council and the hostile local media balked, Giuliani stood firm.
And he won. He also put the clamps on the growth of spending, holding
increases during his tenure below the rate of inflation and below the
population growth of the city.
That is an achievement of which Ronald Reagan could only dream. So is
this: Giuliani stripped the city’s regulatory agencies of their
authority to govern 21 of 72 business categories, undertook 60
successful privatization initiatives and sold thousands of city-owned
assets and properties back to the private sector. He also learned as he
governed. An ardent opponent of school-choice initiatives when he took
office, Giuliani witnessed the failure of the city’s public schools and
evolved during his tenure into an eloquent proponent of school choice.
As president, Giuliani pledges to pursue supply-side economic policies,
free-market health care reforms, the appointment of strict
constructionist judges and the aggressive prosecution of what he calls
“the terrorists’ war on us.”
His reward for all this? A typical comment of the conservative activist
community came recently from a respected colleague of mine – a supporter
of Fred Thompson’s candidacy: “Giuliani is a liberal.”
Good grief.
Giuliani was far from a perfect conservative as mayor. He fought the
presidential line-item veto to protect federal funding for New York
City. He opposed ending rent control to avoid having to spend political
capital on the issue. He sued gun manufacturers as a grandstanding
element of his larger (and successful) effort to reduce crime. For eight
years, Giuliani governed in a liberal environment, and made a choice to
pursue certain conservative priorities at the expense of others. It was
his only play. That he achieved any of it was nothing short of
remarkable.
As a matter of personal philosophy, there is no doubt he was far less
conservative at the beginning of his tenure than he was at the end.
Eight years of witnessing firsthand the failures of liberalism will do
that to you.
Conservatives like their candidates ideologically blameless. It is one
reason many support Thompson, who had a reasonably conservative voting
record as a senator, and one reason a handful support Rep. Duncan
Hunter, whose conservative voting record is virtually without blemish.
But amassing a legislative voting record is not the same as governing.
It is easy to look into the record of anyone who has served as a
governor or mayor and find examples of compromise and ideological
impurity. If you want to, it is easy to completely ignore the big
picture of what the person accomplished throughout his tenure.
I
love my fellow conservatives, so I hate to say this, but a lot of them
are acting like infantile idiots. There is more to being president than
taking stands on issues. In order for a conservative president to
accomplish anything conservative, he needs to govern effectively, make
good choices and achieve legislative success. If you think that will be
hard in Washington – and it will – try it in New York.
Rudy Giuliani has achieved more in the realm of conservative governance
than all of his top-tier colleagues combined, and he did it in one of
the most liberal cities in America. To tar him as a liberal because he
compromised and made choices – in other words, he governed – is merely
to belie your own lack of political sophistication. One can only hope
that such voices are louder than they are numerous.
© 2007 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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