Giuliani in the Carolinas, or What He Needs to Do

The New York Sun relates Rudy Giuliani's visit to South Carolina yesterday.

South Carolina has a key early primary in the GOP presidential nominating sequence.   Giuliani received a warm reception during his visit, and apparently pleased the crowds before whom he spoke.   Ryan Sager, who wrote the NY Sun piece, appears to be reporting that the overall sentiment there may be shifting toward Giuliani at John McCain's expense. 

The candidate I have preferred, George Allen, has had a bad week.  I will blog about that later.   But if Allen cannot be the candidate, many will need to decide who among the remaining field should rise to the top.  McCain? Giuliani? Romney?

Of those three potential candidates, Giuliani's credentials on the social issues are most weak.  His views on abortion and gay rights-- and his past personal life-- have been discussed as his chief liabilities among the GOP base. 

I had related last year on this blog that Giuliani was previously pro-life.  He changed his position in order to qualify for the Liberal Party endorsement when he ran for mayor of New York City.  The leader of the Liberal Party, Ray Harding, wanted to endorse Giuliani because the city had deteriorated so severely; but his precondition was that Giuliani had to be pro-choice.  The rest is history.

Giuliani's opponents will find ample material to use against him with the GOP base.  Whether they will do so is another matter entirely.

Here is my concern:  the modern presidential campaign is so heavily dependent on telegenicity-- on the ability to appear and do well on television-- that a McCain candidacy, in my mind, is questionable.  I do not know if he does as well on television as he needs to do in order to win.  I keep thinking back at the 1996 candidacy of Bob Dole, which was disastrous.  The idea of selecting a candidate because "his time has come" ignores the realities of competing for the job.

I think Giuliani needs to finesse his positions on the social issues.  What he needs to say to the public is that his approach to nominating judges will be to seek "strict constructionist" nominees who will interpret the law-- not write the law.  He should say that he believes in the legal principle of federalism, and that certain important questions should be decided at the state and local level.  He should say that he doesn't think judges should write the law on highly divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage-- but rather, that these questions should be decided by lawmakers in the state legislatures.

In spite of certain weaknesses, he possesses enormous political strengths-- and he is conservative temperamentally on many issues.  He appears to be positioning himself as best able to lead the nation in the war on terror.  It is easy to envision him taking early primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In spite of my enormous admiration for the manner in which he transformed New York, my convictions as a pro-life Republican make me a bit uneasy with his possible candidacy.   He needs to make clear his approach to choosing judges if he wants the party base to work for him wholeheartedly.

Comments

[Roch101]

All those things you recommend Giuliani say, do you think he should say them or mean them?

[Jim Caserta]

I'm interested to hear if Allen is still your guy. It sounded to me like you were trying to sqeeze Rudy into the box of a candidate you want, when there is probably someone out there who is already saying the things that you want Rudy to say.

Is a candidate's nominal pro-life stance a litmus test for you? What about a candidate with a "safe, legal, and rare" stance towards abortion who had a stated goal of cutting the number performed in half within 4 years? I don't know the statistics, but the number of abortions performed under Bush has probably been about the same, and I have heard nothing on this issue besides a shift to abstinence only sex-ed. An overturning of Roe v. Wade will not end abortion, it will only set up a patchwork of laws from state-to-state, with 3 of the big 4 (NY, CA, & FL) keeping it legal. Is the goal to have abortion illegal, or to have less abortions performed?

[Joe Guarino]

Roch, I think he should say them and mean them. We need to remember that Giuliani was a high ranking Justice Department official in Washington during the Reagan Administration-- an assistant attorney general, if I remember correctly-- so it is not inconceivable that what I stated represents something close to his actual views. And, as I indicated above, he considered himself to be anti-abortion prior to his run for mayor.

[Joe Guarino]

Jim, I hope to be posting more about Allen in the near future.

For state and federal offices, a candidate's stand on abortion carries considerable weight with me. I consider abortion to be the single greatest injustice in modern American history-- 45 million lives taken since Roe. But a candidate's stand on abortion is also a proxy indicator, for me, of whether that candidate even remotely shares my overall worldview.

In practical terms, issues related to abortion and the pro-life rarely are items of discussion at the city or county level. That is why Giuliani was able to take the position he did without any major consequence.

I would be very happy if we truly made abortion rare-- but I do not see that happening now, nor did it happen under Clinton. Advocating sex education and contraception on a population basis do not make abortion rare. I would be quite satisfied with certain political compromises that would make abortion more rare-- and in fact I will have a column about that in the paper on Sunday.

I think a "patchwork" of different abortion regulations from state to state would be excellent. That is what I want. My personal preference would be to make it illegal; but my political goal is to get the issue back in the hands of the individual state legislatures-- where it belongs.