Nobody expected Rudy Giuliani to be a serious contender for the GOP nomination this time last year. Hell, nobody thought he would even run. The GOP first string was all but declared: Virginia Senator George "Macaca" "Macaca" Allen, Senator Bill "Tears can give you AIDS" Frist of Tennessee, Senator Rick "I'd love a bottle of" Santorum of Pennsylvania, and Governor Jeb Bush of Florida (sorry, all out of snarky nicknames, although Jeb was the only one of these bozos who was halfway competent). At this point, you can add a former in front of all their names, because they're all out of office, Allen and Santorum involuntarily. Frist elected not to run for the Presidency, perhaps because he's about as exciting as the Metro section from an 1896 Los Angeles Times, and the elder Bush brother saw the writing on the wall and distanced himself from the presidential race as soon as possible. And probably spending many nights drinking and cursing his twit of a younger brother for ruining his career. Oh, well.
So, the top tier was vanquished, thankfully. True, Frist or Bush might be a potential VP candidate, but still--they're gone. That left a palpable hole for three people who otherwise would not have had a chance at the Presidency: ex-New York City Mayor (and social liberal) Giuliani, John McCain, and used to be Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney. Rudy is lucky, as this is the rare year where Republicans seem totally uninterested in the traditional social issues they have always paid lip service to: he's pro-choice, pro-civil union, and anti-gun, which is rare to find these days in a top-tier GOP candidate. It's true that parties sometimes run candidates who don't necessarily agree with them because of the national hero factor: one need look no futher than Dwight Eisenhower, who was firmly in the Democratic camp on foreign affairs and the New Deal, and actually cut military spending every year he was in office to balance the budget. Giuliani gained a lot of prestige from 9/11 after a very troubled second term as NYC Mayor, but is that (or the accomplishments of his first term) enough on its own to make up for his apostasy on the GOP's core issues?
As it turns out, no. But it isn't all Rudy is peddling. Rudy has been running a good game plan up until now, I have to admit. He's making his social positions an asset by saying they make him more electable, while appealing to conservatives on the issues that they care about at the moment. In particular, he has adopted an ultra-hawkish foreign policy stance that is arguably more belligerent than that of the Bush Administration. He says things along the line of, "It's good that, after 9/11, the President went on offense." First of all, I remember at the time that Bush showed admirable restraint in pursuing a military retribution to the 9/11 attacks that garnered respect from both the media and from Democrats. Second, this sound bite makes it sound as though Rudy felt that Bush could have attacked anywhere and it would have been proper. Rudy has been energetically been dissembling the same Cheney-esque BS that this administration has been selling us on the war. We hear from him chestnuts like, "[Going into Iraq] was absolutely the right thing to do...it is impossible to imagine fighting the War on Terror leaving Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq." Never mind that Saddam was detested by OBL and al-Qaeda, and provided no help to their cause. He's also selling the we need to fight them over there or else we'll fight them over here spiel, which fails the laugh test. For one thing, Iraqi insurgents are not all composed of one group, or even two groups. al-Qaeda accounts for very little of the insurgency. By and large we're dealing with Sunni and Shi'a nationalists who are struggling for power in Iraq, and they would have very little interest in coming back here to attack us. They just want us out.
All this is especially irritating when one considers that Giuliani is perhaps the least-qualified major candidate to talk about foreign affairs. His experience in foreign affairs is nonexistent, unless you count throwing Yassir Arafat out of Lincoln Center experience. What I find amazing is that his outlook and leadership style haven't evolved at all in almost fifteen years--he is still the same brash, aggressive, power-hungry man who promised to crack down on broken windows. And that is what spells trouble for me. If he hasn't changed since being Mayor, we're in for a world of hurt. While his first term was impressive, his second mayoral term was an unmitigated disaster, marked by cronyism, vendettas, posturing, and ultimately failure. Sound familiar? Any other world leaders that fit this particular bill? This time, the stakes are much higher--in NYC, the worst that could happen was that some squeegee men could get wrongfully arrested. Now, we're talking about a crisis moment in world affairs--the world hates us, which doesn't bother conservative Republicans, but it should, since we progressively rely upon other countries to manufacture the stuff we buy, as well as to consume the entertainment and other products we sell. We cannot afford to say we're the most powerful country in the world, as we are the world, at this point. Giuliani still has the worldview of a kid bully from New York, and I don't think that someone with so parochial a worldview should be sitting in the Oval Office in 2009.
Giuliani has managed to get social conservatives to support him by moving so far to the neocon right on foreign affairs (as well as on economic issues) that he hopefully would be unelectable to our nation at large. Polls show him beating the prospective Democratic rivals, but when you get down to it, Rudy has been presented to the public in a very positive light, as a competent, tough moderate. Once the public starts paying attention and realizes he's actually an extremist loon who just happens to be pro-choice, I can easily imagine any of the top three Dems taking him out. Everyone seems to say that he is a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode. Let's hope it happens before the election.
