According to Salon, some of the big wigs on the religious right have been meeting in Salt Lake City to lay the groundwork for a third party candidacy should Rudy Giuliani win the Republican nomination.
The bottom line for James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and their colleagues is abortion rights. Giuliani supports Roe v Wade and the leaders of the religious right find that intolerable. James Dobson, probably the no. 1 leader on the religious right is particularly adamant in his refusal to even vote for Giuliani (or Fred Thompson) let alone give him his full-throated support. As a result, he's thinking about picking up their marbles and getting out of the Republican Party game.
Some of this is the fault of conservative religious leaders themselves. Dobson and Bauer have refused to back social conservatives Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback because they viewed these guys as losers. But the refusal of the conservative religious establishment to endorse one of the social conservatives has meant that they had absolutely no chance whatsoever.
The religious right couldn't find it within themselves to hold their noses and support Mitt Romney either.
So now they're nowhere in the Republican Party.
But a third-party campaign from the right would be more of a body shot than a knockout punch to a Giuliani candidacy. That's because people on the left will probably launch a fourth party campaign if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee. It's not like anti-war activists and anti-corporate crusaders (with whom I agree on almost all substantive issues) have been sitting on their hands. They've been supporting Edwards and to a lesser extent Obama. But they aren't winning either.
A fourth party presidential campaign from the left wouldn't be as strong as a religious right campaign from the right (unless Gore or Edwards were running). The left just has less money and less institutional infrastructure than the religious right.
Ultimately then, a third party campaign would hurt Giuliani more than a fourth party effort would hurt Hillary. It just wouldn't be a knock-out punch.
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And the splintering of the Republican party continues. Finally, the religious right faction and the socially moderate faction have come to a point where they may part company. They would actually prefer to eliminate the VERY slim chance that any Republican could win the Presidency with this third-party kamakaze move.
The religious right/big money coalition that has sustained the GOP for all this time has been strained beyond its capacity to survive. It was never a reasonable or logical union to begin with and now its weakness is on display in Salt Lake City for all to see.
As for a fourth-party candidate on the left, I rather doubt it primarily for the reason you indicated. "The left just has less money and less institutional infrastructure than the religious right." I doubt that given the experience of the past six years that anyone will pull another "Ralph Nader", unless it is Ralph Nader himself (always a possibility, the man can't get over himself.)
I think a third party conservative campaign would mortally wound Giuliani. Especially as he is burdened with the legacy of GW Bush and with the moderate views espoused by Giuliani.
In the unlikely event that a fourth-party candidate from the left should emerge at all, I doubt that Hillary would be affected at all.
Voters have already shown that we are ready for a new agenda. People want leadership that will roll back Bush’s top end tax cuts and invest in America, tax Big Oil to support new energy, balance our trade with China and other trading partners. We want workers empowered to organize at the workplace, we want another increase in the the minimum wage, we want universal health care, and more.
Hillary has every intention of delivering those things. Giuliani never would.
All the Republican candidates are for sustaining Bush’s occupation in Iraq and economic policies at home. This is why Hillary will win. Making sense on the economy will be just as important as making sense on Iraq. She does both. Mayor Giuliani does neither.
THOUGHT THIS WAS INTERESTING:
September 9, 2007
America’s Mayor Goes to America
By MATT BAI
There are at least half a dozen reasons that a lot of political prognosticators, including many inside his own party, will tell you that Rudolph Giuliani will never be the Republican nominee for president, no matter what the polls say. They are, in no particular order:
1. As New York’s mayor, he was pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-gay rights.
2. He has demonstrated an odd propensity over the years for publicly dressing up in women’s clothing, proof of which is now readily available online, including a disturbing clip of Donald Trump nuzzling the mayor’s bosom.
3. He once endorsed Mario Cuomo for governor.
4. Once, while mayor, he holed up for months at the apartment of a gay couple who were close friends of his. Try explaining that one at Bob Jones University.
5. He has divorced two times; the last time, he broke the news to his family on national television. His two children don’t seem inclined to vote for him, let alone nominate him for Father of the Year.
6. Presidential politics is said to be largely about warmth and likability, and these aren’t words that leap to mind with Giuliani. His former political ally, Ed Koch, once felt moved to write a book titled “Giuliani: Nasty Man.” It sold well.
And yet here we are, just past Labor Day, when presidential campaigns become tangible affairs, and Rudy Giuliani isn’t showing any signs of fading. In fact, he continues to lead the rest of the Republican field in just about every national poll (followed closely by Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney), taking advantage of a fractious party flailing for direction in the era after George W. Bush. While Giuliani trails Romney in the critical early states of New Hampshire (where Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, is basically a local) and Iowa (where Romney seems willing to spend much of his estimated $250 million fortune to win over every churchgoing farmer in the state, if that’s what it takes), a bevy of polls show Rudy cleaning up in large, delegate-rich states on the coasts.
Giuliani’s campaign, like his resurrected political career, is built atop the rubble of the twin towers; his appeal is firmly rooted in the visual images of Sept. 11, 2001, and the policy dilemmas that grew from it. As Ken Mehlman, the former Republican Party chairman, explained it to me recently, elections can either be “squishy” or “crunchy.” Squishy elections, like the one in 2000, are ones where the candidates attempt to blur the differences among them on major issues and run, instead, on more ethereal attributes like character and authenticity, the kind of traits best demonstrated by sipping beers or emoting on “Oprah.” Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t stand much chance in a squishy election. But 2008, Mehlman theorizes, may be a crunchy year, where the nominees of both parties present sharp contrasts on hard philosophical questions, starting with how to view the threat of Islamic terrorism and what course to take in Iraq. And Giuliani is well positioned for such debate, having defined himself, in the public mind, as the unflinching foe of a radical and dangerous ideology. To many, he remains the Churchillian figure who strode up lower Broadway covered in a fine dust of plaster, removing the air filter from his face long enough to rally his panicked city.
The logic of Giuliani’s pitch to voters on terrorism will feel familiar to anyone who paid close attention to his political ascent. When he first won office in 1993, New York was widely considered a city beyond governance, an uncontrollable metropolis where violent crime, entrenched bureaucracy and swollen welfare rolls were accepted as the grim but unshakable realities of urban decline. Rudy ran as a real S.O.B., the guy who had the steel to restore order and sanity where no one else could or would. Whatever you think of Giuliani personally, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t succeed; crime and the welfare rolls plummeted for the first time in decades, while jobs and neighborhoods came back. Giuliani maintained an uneasy détente with the overwhelmingly liberal pool of voters who had chosen him for the job. He did the dirty work that made their city, at long last, livable and safe, the things their political correctness would never allow them to openly countenance. For their part, New Yorkers made a show of disdaining him at dinner parties for his bullying ways and pitiless programs, but they slept better knowing that Rudy was wrestling the city’s myriad demons.
Now Giuliani is running to become that same kind of president. In Giuliani’s view, we live in a dark time, caught up in the opening stages of a war with Islamic radicals that may span a few decades and several continents before it’s won. A president has to be willing to be the bad guy, to do the things that may make even his allies uncomfortable, and to do them with ruthless efficiency. So you wouldn’t want to have a beer with me, Rudy seems to be saying. So even my own kids don’t want to have a beer with me. But whom do you really want staring down the terrorists — me, or one of these other guys? Do you want someone squeezable, or would you rather hire the single-minded enforcer who had the testicular fortitude to tame New York?
Giuliani’s presidential campaign brings to mind that famous scene from “A Few Good Men,” in which Jack Nicholson lectures a boyish Tom Cruise on the practical realities inherent in protecting freedom. In Giuliani’s telling, only a thin wall separates innocent Americans from the violent apostles of a brutal and repressive ideology. You want me on that wall, Rudy would have us believe. You need me on that wall.
Inevitably, presidential campaigns take on the peculiar personalities of the candidates themselves. Bill Clinton’s aides worked without sleep and always behind schedule. George W. Bush’s team couldn’t conceal their Texan arrogance. Giuliani’s campaign staff is remarkably — almost unnervingly — disciplined. His campaign appearances inevitably begin and end on time. Each day of campaigning has a theme (“trial lawyers are bad,” “adoption is good,” etc.), to which the candidate lashes himself without fail, while high-powered surrogates back in Washington issue carefully timed statements backing him up. The campaign is unusually guarded with routine information, giving out only Giuliani’s public schedule, and almost no one associated with the campaign will talk to a reporter without a press aide listening in on the line.
When I first managed to track down Giuliani on the western edge of Iowa in mid-July, I was more impressed than I expected to be. In the abstract, after all, it’s hard to imagine the slashing mayor of New York getting on famously with the people of Sloan, Iowa, a one-strip farming town of about 1,000 people. (Motto: “A Good Place to Grow.”) But Rudy out of his element turns out to be a surprisingly deft campaigner. Ever the prosecutor, he retains a talent for explaining complex concepts, flipping his round spectacles on and off his face for emphasis and rubbing his forehead as if deep in thought. He has a penchant for talking to voters as if he were their tough-love therapist, frequently invoking words like “reality” and “denial.” Vowing to end illegal immigration during one town-hall meeting in Iowa, Giuliani told the crowd, “Every other country does it, and we can do it.” Then he clutched his heart and spoke softly. “It’s O.K. to do it.” You could almost hear a collective sigh among the Iowans, who didn’t consider themselves bigots just because they wanted to seal the borders, and who now felt validated by America’s mayor. They lined up for autographs.
Giuliani’s timing as a candidate is pretty fortuitous. Conservative activists have traditionally rallied around anointed front-runners. Two years ago, smart handicappers in Washington were betting that the White House’s embrace of John McCain, earned at the cost of his hard-won reputation as a political iconoclast, would catapult him above Giuliani, Romney and the rest of the field. But Bush’s sagging approval ratings — even among Republicans — seem now to have reduced his blessing to the value of, say, a signed Michael Vick jersey, and Republican voters this year appear genuinely conflicted about their options. Giuliani’s advisers, meanwhile, have come up with a truly national electoral strategy that represents a sharp departure from the usual obsession with Iowa and New Hampshire. The way they figure it, if Rudy can wrest the delegates in the friendly, winner-take-all states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, along with a combination of wins in either California or Florida or Illinois, he will be well on his way toward securing the nomination.
Even so, recent history would suggest that he at least has to place among the leaders in Iowa, so that voters elsewhere — and the news media — don’t write him off before the race even starts. And that means that Giuliani, the only pro-choice candidate in the Republican field, has to win over a sizable share of the social conservatives who dominate the Iowa caucuses.
So now Giuliani — who was, during his mayoralty, nothing if not a political pragmatist — suddenly finds himself sounding fiercely unpragmatic. On the Second Amendment, he declares: “Some people don’t think we should have such a right, and that’s fine, but the only way you can change that is to change the Constitution.” Giuliani mentions his love for Ronald Reagan more often than he uses the men’s room, and he frequently disses New Yorkers as a bunch of soft-headed liberals, hoping to put some distance between himself and those kooky constituents who twice elected him. Temperamentally, however, Giuliani’s first impulse always leans toward brutal candor, and there are moments when he just can’t seem to channel his inner Gary Bauer. At a family restaurant in Le Mars (“the ice-cream capital of the world”), Giuliani was asked about his religious beliefs. “I believe in God,” he said haltingly. “I pray and ask him for help. I pray like a lawyer. I try to make a deal: ‘Get me out of this jam, and I’ll start going back to church.’ ” Then he wandered off into a discourse that somehow ended up with an assessment of Times Square and how good he feels that there are so many “functioning theaters” there.
It’s not an especially convincing routine, but it may be good enough. Conservatives desperately fear another Clinton presidency and may embrace anyone who seems likely to blunt Hillary’s advantage in moderate swing states. (A button I saw in Iowa proclaimed, “I’m helping Rudy stop Hillary.”) And old assumptions of what an evangelical voter actually wants may no longer be operative. There is a sense among the Christian right, says the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who isn’t working for any of the candidates, that beating back the global onslaught of radical Islam may be a more pressing religious issue than stomping out liberal judges at home. “These same people who are pro-life, they’ll support Giuliani because he’ll uphold the Judeo-Christian ethic, and he isn’t afraid to talk about it,” Luntz says. “For these voters, the war has become a social issue.”
When Luntz talks about “the war,” he does not draw a hard distinction between the quagmire in Iraq and Bush’s war on terror, and this is one of the differences that now sharply separate the two parties in Washington. There is an interesting historical contrast here. In the 1940s, during the first years after the sudden onset of the cold war, politicians argued passionately over the nature of the threat — whether to pursue a negotiated peace with the Soviets, whether to engage them militarily in Europe or whether to withdraw from the global arena altogether. These differences never entirely disappeared, but within a decade, a rough consensus emerged around the doctrine of containment. By the time John Kennedy and Richard Nixon clashed in 1960, the argument wasn’t over whether to confront the Soviets or how but about who would be more resolute.
The argument over terrorism, however, seems to be moving in precisely the opposite direction. In the months and years immediately following Sept. 11, there was very little open dissent in Washington over the conceit of the war or its importance; politicians of both parties spent most of their time trying to sound tougher on terrorists than the next guy. But now, six years after the attacks, a philosophical divide between the two parties is rapidly widening.
Democrats now openly question the entire premise of a “war on terror” (or, as Giuliani likes to call it, a “terrorists’ war on us”), and, privately, at least, they are increasingly willing to argue that Islamic radicals do not represent the same kind of existential threat that the Stalinists did, with their vast military machinery. There is a growing, though not unanimous, feeling in liberal policy circles that remaking the nation’s entire foreign policy around terrorism is an overreaction to what is, essentially, a serious but manageable threat. As one senior Democratic policy aide put it to me recently, the terrorist attacks that claimed some 3,000 innocent American lives were indescribably tragic, but if you had gone to sleep on Sept. 10, 2001, and woken up sometime in 2006, surely you would have thought, to hear the political rhetoric, that several American cities had been wiped off the map. In this view, Al Qaeda is not a defining ideological adversary so much as a stateless, lethal criminal enterprise without any real historical antecedent, and Bush’s war in Iraq has nothing to do with the campaign against organized terrorists — except perhaps to swell their ranks by recklessly throwing around America’s military might.
On the other side are the majority of Republicans, who accept the president’s view that Al Qaeda and its sympathizers are the ideological successors to the most dangerous tyrannies of the 20th century, Hitlerian fascism and Soviet Communism. This is why Giuliani invokes either Churchill or Reagan, or both, virtually every time he speaks on the subject; in his mind, the next president faces exactly the same kind of struggle with a hungry agent of totalitarianism. By this logic, both Afghanistan and Iraq are mere battles in a global war that will see other fronts opened — the next could well be Iran — before it meets its conclusion. As in the cold war, the object is to avoid as many shooting battles as possible, and yet conservatives leave little doubt that they believe the principal tools in rooting out terrorism will always be military force abroad and relentless investigations at home. As Giuliani says over and over again, America must remain “on offense” against the terrorists, which is another way of saying, as Bush does, that taking the fight to the regimes that harbor terrorists abroad is the only way to avoid having to fight those terrorists at home. No matter what Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, says about the prospects for victory there in his report to Congress, which is expected later this week, Giuliani has made it clear that he will continue to support combat missions against terrorists wherever they are found, from Mosul to Mogadishu.
More than any other Republican candidate, with the possible exception of John McCain, Giuliani has rooted his campaign in the grand and foreboding notion that America is now engaged in a civilizational struggle. The foreign-policy advisory group he announced in July consisted of eight strident thinkers who have staked out sharply conservative views on the nature and pervasiveness of Islamic terrorism and the compromises required in American civil liberties. (Giuliani’s campaign has an unusually intellectual bent in this way, with committees of conservative experts e-mailing furiously to discuss and debate positions in every policy area.) The advisers include, for instance, Peter Berkowitz, a legal academic and political philosopher who has defended the decision to invade Iraq; and Martin Kramer, a Middle East expert affiliated with Harvard who has warned that Islamists could begin their own crusade against the West and has declared that “hundreds of millions of Muslims who live alongside us and among us inhabit another mental world.” Perhaps the most striking appointment to the committee is that of Norman Podhoretz, a creator of the neoconservative movement. Podhoretz has argued passionately for bombing Iran, most recently in his new book, “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.” (In case you were wondering how you missed World War III, that’s how Podhoretz refers to the cold war.)
When Podhoretz spoke with me by phone from his vacation home in the Hamptons, he told me that he had just one complaint with President Bush’s handling of this fourth world conflagration: for political reasons, perhaps, the president kept talking about Islam as a religion of peace and making it sound as if there weren’t many terrorists, when in fact, in Podhoretz’s view, Al Qaeda represented a reasonably clear window into mainstream Islam. “The Islamofascist movement, as I insist on calling it, has way more fanatical, devoted followers than the Communists had at their peak,” he explained. “I mean, there are between 1.5 and 2 billion Muslims in the world. Not all of them are Islamofascists. But if even 10 percent of them are, you have staggering numbers. And certainly a large percentage of Muslims at least sympathize with Osama bin Laden.”
Podhoretz told me that he was in touch with the Giuliani campaign, either by e-mail or telephone, at least once a day, on average. I asked him if there were aspects of terrorism or the Muslim world on which Giuliani might disagree with him. “If he does, I haven’t discovered it,” Podhoretz replied. “He sees the war pretty much the way I see it.”
In fact, Giuliani sometimes refers to himself in campaign speeches as “an expert on terrorism,” someone who has been studying its emergence for 30 years. Part of Rudy’s obsession with Winston Churchill, other than the flattering comparisons from which he benefited after Sept. 11, is that he sees himself as the same kind of lonely figure that Churchill was in the “Gathering Storm” years before World War II — a politician long driven to make people understand the gravity of the peril they face, no matter how his enemies may caricature him for it. In Giuliani’s version of this narrative, the part of Neville Chamberlain is played by Bill Clinton, who allowed several terrorist attacks in the 1990s to go, in Giuliani’s view, unanswered. It is an analogy that Rudy’s friends and advisers are quick to draw, as well. “The mayor is getting close to a Churchillian moment, where Churchill is just being denounced and spat upon,” says Charles Hill, a former career diplomat who teaches at Yale and leads Giuliani’s foreign-policy group. “Every intellectual and artist and all the nobility are just dumping on Churchill, and he says: ‘No. You’ve got to stick with it. You’ve got to see the Nazis for who they are.’ ”
On the surface, it’s an odd comparison, not least because, while Churchill foresaw a threat that few in his time fully understood, there’s not much evidence to suggest that Giuliani spent a lot of time thinking about Islamic terrorism before Sept. 11. Although New York was the target of at least one successful attack before Giuliani took office (the World Trade Center bombing in 1993) and continued to figure heavily in federal investigations into terrorist cells, the closest Giuliani publicly came to battling terrorists before the planes came bearing down on Manhattan that day was to respond to the emergence of West Nile Virus in Central Park (this was briefly thought to be the work of biological terrorists but turned out to be a naturally spreading disease) and to prepare for an attack on the millennial celebration in Times Square (which, perhaps thanks to the diligence of the feds, never materialized). Jerry Hauer, who was Giuliani’s top adviser for emergency preparedness and later had a nasty falling out with the mayor, now refers to his old boss as a “9/12 expert” — that is, one who saw the grave potential of Islamic terror only after it had been realized. “I can’t remember in the whole time I worked for him having a discussion about Islam or Al Qaeda,” Hauer told me. “The words ‘Al Qaeda’ were never part of his vocabulary.”
To be fair, though, while Giuliani’s claim of expertise may be classic campaign-trail hyperbole, it is true that his general awareness of global terrorism probably predates that of other candidates. When he was at the Justice Department in the 1980s, Giuliani was part of a team investigating Yasir Arafat, at a time when Arafat was considered a primary sponsor of Middle Eastern terrorism. Those who have worked closely with Giuliani in his postmayoral life tell the story of a man who had some vague interest in Islamic terrorism long before Sept. 11 but whose experience on the day transformed this longstanding interest into a kind of personal mission.
What Giuliani hadn’t done by the time I saw him in Iowa, however, was lay out in any detail how he planned to win this supposed new world war, or unveil any ideas that would differentiate his approach from that of the present administration’s. Both Churchill and Reagan, when they emerged as national leaders, made it very clear what they intended to do to meet the threats of fascism and Communism; in both cases, it began with a massive arms buildup, and in both cases it represented a sharp departure from the doctrines of their immediate predecessors. Giuliani had the opportunity to articulate some comparable vision in a 16-page essay he wrote, with Hill’s assistance, for the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs (one of a series written by presidential candidates). The piece offered a few significant insights into Giuliani’s thinking, like the implication that he does not share Bush’s zeal for exporting democracy to the Middle East. “Elections are necessary but not sufficient to establish genuine democracy,” Giuliani wrote. “Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors. History demonstrates that democracy usually follows good governance, not the reverse.”
For the most part, however, the article turned out to be a disappointing litany of bland generalities and stale cold war rhetoric. Giuliani included a single, unremarkable line about the need to secure ports and borders. He praised the Patriot Act and warned vaguely that we must “not unrealistically limit electronic surveillance or legal interrogation” but did not elaborate. (In campaign speeches, he is only slightly less opaque about civil liberties, endorsing “aggressive” tactics that, he says, do not include torture, although he doesn’t define the term.)
None of this answered the most basic policy questions that loom over this next election. The most obvious of these concern Iraq, but there are other terrorism-related challenges that may haunt the dreams of the next commander in chief, even if the troops are withdrawn. What will the next president do about instability in Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan or the perception of America in the Islamic world? Giuliani hadn’t submitted himself to any lengthy examinations on these questions, which raised for me an equally relevant question about him: Was Rudy Giuliani just the guy who happened to run a city on the day that it was struck by terrorists? Or did he actually have some new vision for how to keep it from happening again?
After several weeks of requesting a 90-minute interview with Giuliani to discuss some of these vexing policy questions, I was finally informed that I could have 45 minutes with him after his town-hall meeting at a high school in Bettendorf, Iowa, in early August. We sat down in some kind of faculty room with a retired New York City detective, one of two on Giuliani’s private detail, sitting outside the door. Giuliani seemed a different man from the last time I had interviewed him like this, which was eight years ago, in the wake of the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, in the Bronx. That controversy had very nearly ruined his political career, and I still had an image in my mind of Giuliani then, looking pale in a darkened room at Gracie Mansion, answering questions briskly and in a subdued tone, as if being held there against his will. Now here he was, America’s mayor, as if all that ugliness of his final years in office had never happened, and this Giuliani was genial and relaxed — likable, even. We made small talk about his elephant tie and the Yankees.
Forty-five minutes isn’t very long when your goal is to talk about the complexities of foreign policy, and so I quickly got down to the topic at hand. I began to ask a question about Giuliani’s previous experience with terrorism, but he cut me off and reminded me of his initial investigation of Arafat. He then launched into an expansive soliloquy about the Palestinian Liberation Organization and his friendships with Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert, the late and current prime ministers of Israel, and about how he had traveled to Israel three times as mayor, and then he ran down the particulars of each of those trips and why he decided to make them. I tried to redirect him a few times, but Giuliani kept happily meandering. A few times, he ignored my attempts to interrupt him altogether.
At one point, I tried to steer the conversation back to Al Qaeda and the pressing challenges of the moment by asking him if there were any scholarly works that had affected his thinking on the current terrorist threat. There weren’t, but this led him to discourse on all the briefings he used to receive as mayor, and how he had been compelled to close down public spaces in Manhattan, and about all the things he knew about terrorism then that he could not, unfortunately, share with me, because they probably remained classified.
By now, a full 16 minutes had passed, and we still hadn’t talked about a single specific piece of what would be his antiterrorism strategy in the White House. I exchanged a helpless glance with Katie Levinson, Giuliani’s communications director. It occurred to me, as Giuliani talked on, that this might not have been an accident. Experienced politicians have been known to filibuster on a single question or two, knowing that if they can use up most of the allotted time on tangents, they might not have to spend so much time on the more difficult questions that lie ahead. Giuliani is a very experienced politician.
When, at last, Giuliani came to a pause, I began again to ask him about the National Intelligence Estimate, but before the words could leave my mouth, something else occurred to him.
“The other thing, I have to tell you, is that I have real knowledge of the other side of it, of the Arab-Muslim world that is peaceful, friendly, that is peaceful, that loves freedom as much as we do, that loves us and cares about us, that loves America, that exists in the Arab world and that exists in the Muslim world.” I looked up, disbelieving. This was precisely the opposite of what Podhoretz and other advisers had said; it sounded more like the Giuliani who had eloquently appealed for calm on behalf of New York’s Muslim community after Sept. 11. Giuliani forged on, offering his own distinctly capitalist version of a campaign to erase the stains of Guantánamo Bay and win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims — a plan that seemed to hinge on turning Syria into Dubai.
“If you want an oversimplification of people in the Middle East, they are entrepreneurs,” he said with evident enthusiasm. “They’re commercial people. They’re people we can get along with. And when they can develop their own reasons for modifying some of the ancient interpretations to make themselves part of the modern world, it really works. So I’m very open to doing more business with them, having more interchange with them, getting Americans to understand who they are and what they are.”
Almost half the interview had passed when I finally managed to ask Giuliani about his plan for Pakistan. Should the United States push the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to get tougher on the terrorist training camps in his country — even if it risked the possible overthrow of his regime? It seemed like a classic conundrum.
“That is a classic problem,” Giuliani admitted, nodding. “You could describe Saudi Arabia the same way. There isn’t a simplistic policy, one-line answer. It isn’t ‘get tougher on them’ or ‘get easier on them.’ It’s a combination of both. It’s trying to push Musharraf.” If the United States had to intervene militarily to eliminate training camps, he said, then it should get the regime’s permission to do it first.
“I guarantee you, there’s nobody in this country who wants to catch Bin Laden more than I do,” Giuliani said. “And it is personal.” But in order to do that, a president had to constructively engage Musharraf. “So it’s a complex strategy of supporting them, helping them, pushing them,” he said, summing up.
This sounded not at all different from what the current administration was already doing, I offered.
“I don’t know, below the surface, below what we know, about how much pressure is being put on them to crush Al Qaeda and crush the Taliban,” he said. “I have the feeling, from the outside — and this could be unfair — that it isn’t enough. I just have a feeling. That could be wrong.” But after advancing that subtle criticism of Bush, he then quickly added: “I also have the feeling that that’s been changed. But all of this is a feeling. I don’t get the classified information. It’s more like maybe the kind of information you get.”
I asked Giuliani how exactly he would go about pressuring Musharraf. Didn’t the Pakistani leader pretty much know that the United States couldn’t afford to break with him?
“Part of negotiating,” Giuliani said, “is so that somebody doesn’t become too comfortable in their view and ability to predict you. Ronald Reagan was our most dominant president of the second half of the 20th century for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons he won the cold war was that he was a little unpredictable. It had an impact. You can never in negotiations be totally predictable. The minute you’re predictable, they’re going to figure out how to take advantage.”
In other words, Giuliani was saying that his comparative advantage over other potential presidents was that he, like Reagan, already had a reputation for being a little trigger-happy. You need me on that wall.
I shifted to Iran. It felt as if we were speed-dating. What steps was he going to take that hadn’t already been taken to keep the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons?
The real danger, Giuliani said, was not that Iran and its bellicose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would actually use the weapons, but that they might try to stealthily hand off the technology to terrorists. “This is a combination of not just dealing with a nation-state but with organized criminals also,” he said. “And it’s also a case of dealing with unbalanced people. Ahmadinejad, we would have to conclude, is not a balanced person.”
“Some people have said the same about you,” I pointed out.
“I hope it’s on a different level, and there’s no moral equivalent!” Giuliani shot back, laughing. Then he said: “The thing that concerns me about the mullahs, and not just Ahmadinejad, is that it’s an unrealistic regime, meaning they have unrealistic views of the world. That is true basically of Islamic terrorists. They are very dangerous. They can be very shrewd and very smart, but they live in somewhat of a fantasy world.” He went on to describe the Iranians as “irrational” and “unbalanced” before concluding: “I believe there is a real risk that they might believe they could hand off dirty weapons. You’re then going to have a dirty bomb explode in London or Rome or America, and they would say: ‘We don’t know anything about that. Now go prove it.’ And after what we went through with the weapons of mass destruction, and particularly if we had a president who needed a high degree of proof, this might be something they could assume that they can get away with. So how do you prevent this? You make sure they’re not nuclear.”
This, of course, brought us right back to the initial question, which was how to do exactly that. Giuliani said the Iranians had to know that America was serious about stopping them. I asked him: Didn’t he think they already knew we were serious? Bush had invaded Iraq for less. That was pretty serious.
“I don’t think it’s real clear,” Giuliani said, blaming Democrats for muddying the message about American resolve. “I think it has to be Ronald Reagan-like real clear. If it is, we have a chance of accomplishing what Ronald Reagan did, which is winning the war without firing a shot.”
On Iraq, Giuliani said that the United States had to stay there until the country was stable and wouldn’t serve as a “headquarters for terrorism,” a long effort that, he maintained, required the same kind of Reagan-like steadfastness. “We should try to accomplish there what we accomplished in Japan or in Germany,” he said. “We removed the military capacity for at least a generation or two, and now they’ve been able to develop a whole new way of looking at the world.” With this, Giuliani seemed to be suggesting that his bar for success in Iraq was considerably higher than simply preventing a terrorist haven; he seemed to want to disarm the entire country before he was through.
In fact, Giuliani’s answer to all complex foreign-policy dilemmas was essentially the same: the American president had to be someone the rest of the world feared, someone a little too rash and belligerent for anyone else’s comfort. I suggested to him that he really didn’t seem to be proposing any new philosophies distinct from what the Bush administration had been pursuing for the last six years. Instead, he seemed to be arguing that what he offered the country was a certain brand of unswerving leadership that America and the rest of the world would have no trouble understanding.
“Correct,” Giuliani replied. “Correct.”
Giuliani had read his history, and this was the lesson he had taken away. Both Churchill and Reagan had fused a fundamental shift in thinking to sheer force of personality, but to Giuliani, the policy was the personality. The moment didn’t call for some new approach to combating terrorism; what America needed, instead, was a wartime personality who was ready, like Churchill and Reagan, to stride into history and firmly establish the nation’s resolve in the eyes of the world. None of the other potential commanders in chief in either party had saved a fallen city or been knighted by the queen of England. It was hard to picture Mitt Romney holed up in a London bunker with his generals while the bombs fell all around him, or Barack Obama demanding that the Soviets tear down that wall. Giuliani came with no such mental limitation. His “Churchillian moment” was less about the substance of governing than about the image most Americans had of him — and, maybe more to the point, the image he has of himself.
It so happens that Giuliani’s essential premise for waging war on terrorists — this idea that firmness and an innate ability to scare your adversaries are more important than having, say, some new strategy for engaging Iranian moderates — also reflects the political reality inside the Republican Party. None of the leading Republican candidates has been willing to articulate anything like a new direction for how to confront terrorism or what to do in Iraq, despite the fact that the Bush doctrine of forcibly spreading democracy has been widely deemed a failure, even by a sizable chunk of Republicans. To do so would violate some code of the Republican Party, which tends to be more hierarchal and more mindful of loyalty than the Democratic variety. Republican voters may be dissatisfied with Bush, but they still value his toughness on terrorism, and they’d most likely punish any candidate who broke openly with the policy of an incumbent president. “To go out and say you’re against Bush right now would be political suicide,” says Scott Reed, the veteran strategist who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign.
Even so, there is a subtext to the Republican campaign, a subtle way that all the leading candidates have of critiquing Bush without really appearing to. The Republican contenders seem to sense that the debate on terrorism inside the party has shifted from whether you’re going to stand up to terrorism to how competently you’ll do it. In other words, primary voters seem to have decided that Bush, while right on the big stuff, just isn’t very good at the follow-through part of the job, and they may be looking for the same essential philosophy in a candidate who will nonetheless be more proficient at managing a war or hiring the right subordinates.
“All the candidates talk about wanting to be safe from terrorists, and they all talk about it in terms of government competence,” Matthew Dowd, Bush’s onetime strategist, told me recently. “It’s no longer about the cowboy standing in the doorway. It’s now about how government works in the 21st century.”
Here, Giuliani would seem to have an impressive case to make. In New York, Giuliani started a practice — later imitated by mayors around the country — of instilling “metrics” to measure government’s progress. The most notable of these was in policing, where William Bratton, Giuliani’s first police chief, introduced the “Compstat” program, under which the city was divided by police precinct and detailed reports were compiled outlining the incidence of crime in each of those precincts. Based on these reports, the department could analyze where exactly crime was a problem and why, and depending on the likely causes, the police could then assign more or specialized units to specific blocks and neighborhoods. Compstat was one of the shining government successes of its era, and Giuliani expanded the principle to other city departments. “If you can’t measure something,” he likes to say, “then you cannot manage it.”
By stressing his managerial competence, Giuliani is able to signal that he is like Bush — only more effective. When frustrated voters ask Giuliani about the intractability of problems like health care or immigration, as they sometimes do, you can almost see him brighten. “I’m very good, ” he once began to say at a town hall meeting before stopping to collect his thoughts. “I’m trying to say this in the most humble way possible. I’m very good at doing the impossible.”
This idea is integral to Giuliani’s position on Iraq. The war threatens to shadow whomever the Republicans nominate next year, since every one of the leading candidates has tied himself to Bush’s policy of pressing on with the war, even as American voters have become pessimistic about the chances of a successful outcome. Giuliani seems to be betting, though, that most of those Americans aren’t nearly as skeptical about the mission itself so much as they are about the likelihood of it ever working, and that they might in fact support staying in Iraq if they thought the next president stood a decent chance of cleaning up Bush’s mess. Giuliani, who has not been to Iraq, often compares the situation there to the morass he inherited on the streets of New York in 1994, during those disorderly days before he and Bratton turned things around. He promises to instill a kind of Compstat system that would reliably measure the different sorts of activities in every sector of Iraq, from car bombings to school openings, so that he could deploy the military’s resources accordingly. (In fact, the military has begun to do precisely this in recent months, although Giuliani said he didn’t know how effectively.) The basic message here is that if anyone can get the Iraqi government into shape and make the country secure and livable for its citizens, thus enabling American troops to come home, it’s the same guy who made the Lower East Side safe for yuppies.
Giuliani never comes out and says that his metrics and his experience in New York would make him a better president than Bush, but others fill in the blanks. “I like President Bush, and I like Giuliani, so I’m not walking away from President Bush when I say this,” Peter King, the New York congressman and ranking Republican on the Homeland Security committee, told me. “But what would be different? They’re two totally different personalities. Rudy, before you get to any issue, he absorbs all the possible facts that he can. His style would be very much more hands-on.”
I heard much the same thing from Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I. director, when I asked him how he thought Giuliani might differ from Bush in his commitment to hunting down terrorists.
“I think the president and Rudy Giuliani would be about the same there,” Freeh said, choosing his words carefully. “On the execution of that, I think Rudy would do a very credible and a very efficient execution. That means you put good people in charge of it, you hold them accountable for their success and you don’t tolerate long periods of failure in that regard.”
“So are you saying that Bush has failed in those areas?” I asked. A long moment passed.
“You have my quote,” Freeh replied.
After following him to diners and school gymnasiums across Iowa, I had to admit that there was something seductive in hearing Giuliani tout his own competence, in the certainty he brings to complex challenges. Take immigration, for instance, an issue that seems so mired in a thicket of logistical and political vines as to be almost impassable. Giuliani’s opponents, particularly Romney, have been hammering him on this issue, portraying New York as a lawless sanctuary where suspicious foreigners come to disappear.
“Here’s what I would do,” Giuliani declares in an effort to blunt this attack. First, he would install a high-tech aerial monitoring system (“Borderstat,” of course) that would tell you where, in the gaps along the physical border fence, illegal immigrants were crossing over. Then he would flood those hot spots with border guards, rather than trying to spread them out across the entire border. Once the flow of illegals had been stanched, the immigrants who were already here would seem like a more manageable population, and that problem would “work itself out.” Giuliani offers a specific timetable for sealing the border — “I think I could do this in about 18 months to three years” — as if he were making a reasonable bid to remodel your basement.
“Don’t let anyone tell you this can’t be done,” he says. “I’m absolutely certain we can do this.” The effect, even for a skeptic, is reassuring. In the moment, you find yourself thinking: Of course he can. Why not?
And yet, without denying Giuliani his achievements in New York, the question of his competence is far from settled, even as it pertains to his handling of the terrorist attacks themselves. In their muckraking but thoroughly reported book, “Grand Illusion,” the Giuliani critics Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins lay out a series of serious managerial errors that contributed to the tragedy of Sept. 11: radios that didn’t operate properly or work between departments; an emergency command center inexplicably located inside the towers complex itself; top police commanders acting as Giuliani’s security detail when they should have been coordinating with fire chiefs. All of this is hindsight, of course, the kind of uncharitable, after-the-fact scrutinizing that might be done of any leader in a crisis. And yet, even taking that into account, it’s remarkable that, as Barrett and Collins point out, Giuliani has never had to answer for it. In their own book, the joint leaders of the commission that investigated the response to the attacks, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, made the stunning admission that they had essentially failed to ask Giuliani “tough questions” about these and other issues, because they feared the fallout from criticizing the hero of Sept. 11. They called it a “low point” in the investigation.
Nor is it self-evident, as Louis Freeh puts it, that Giuliani would “put good people in charge” and “hold them accountable.” It was Giuliani, after all, who promoted Bernard Kerik, a former detective and once his driver on the campaign, to become police commissioner, and who pushed for his nomination as Homeland Security secretary. Kerik had to withdraw amid a litany of allegations and is still facing possible prosecution on tax fraud.
Perhaps a more telling episode about Giuliani, though, is the story of what happened to New York City policing in the years after Compstat arrived to remake the landscape. After the relationship between Giuliani and Bratton soured and Bratton left his post, Giuliani continued to push hard for crime reductions in the city, and racial tensions flared between citizens and the police in the outer boroughs, to the point where Giuliani’s own approval ratings slid precipitously among allegations of excessive force. Bratton, now the police chief in Los Angeles, has always maintained that while Giuliani was good at the enforcer part of the gig — that is, at the initial process of cracking down — he wasn’t nearly as good at knowing when it was time to let up.
Bratton has likened the aggressive policing style that he pioneered to chemotherapy on a cancer patient; some amount of medicine can cure you, but too much can be lethal. At some point, Bratton told me recently, people needed to feel as if they could enjoy their new, safer streets — the “peace dividend,” as Bratton put it — without fear of running into overly zealous cops. But Giuliani kept demanding more arrests, instead of deploying his police in more creative ways. “It was a tragic mistake,” Bratton said.
This highlights, perhaps, the most relevant flaw in Giuliani’s mostly impressive record in public life if we are going to try to imagine him as a leader in world affairs, standing on that wall. He has never really known when to stop. This was his downfall in New York, before the attacks of Sept. 11 reminded New Yorkers of why they had put their faith in him in the first place. Having ruthlessly driven out the windshield-wiping “squeegee men” and the triple-X theaters and the corner dealers and the pickpockets, having cleaned up the sidewalks and restored the parks, Giuliani just kept going. By the second term, he was after the jaywalkers in Midtown and the cabbies who broke the speed limit. Having brought an admirable measure of control to the ungovernable metropolis, Giuliani seemed to want to control everything. His followers called him inspiring, but “my way or the highway” are the most common words you hear about Rudy from those who worked with him and didn’t love the experience. He was brilliant, they say, intellectually agile, but utterly unyielding.
Giuliani doesn’t exactly run from this image; it is, at bottom, part of the notion he is selling of a leader who won’t back down or settle for mediocrity, who has the sheer force of will to “do the impossible.” After all, Churchill and Reagan were both accused of harboring a dangerous kind of single-mindedness, and history now records their intransigence as visionary. If Giuliani has a problem, though, it might not be that he can tolerate abortion but that he has not been given the historical luxury of campaigning to succeed a Neville Chamberlain or a Jimmy Carter. Instead, his nomination would follow eight years of a president who has already been, if anything, too steadfast and too self-certain. The country has endured a venomous period of unrelenting partisanship and inflexible agendas, and there’s not much in Giuliani’s history or in his own campaign pitch that would suggest he’d be all that different. It’s possible that even weary Republicans are ready to try a new approach.
So far, so good, though, as Rudy Giuliani darts from small town to smaller town in Iowa, offering himself up as a true urban cowboy. He studies his Nascar. He eats turkey legs at the state fair. He bounds onstage to the twangy rhythm of Brooks and Dunn’s “Only in America.” It’s a good song for him, involving stirring images of Manhattan schoolchildren. (“One could end up going to prison, one just might be president. . . . ”) I heard a better one, though, one night on the Iowa plains. It was after 11, and I was driving 200 miles clear across the soy fields, under an ink black sky, so I could catch up with Giuliani the next morning in Waterloo. Somewhere east of Fort Dodge, a Toby Keith song came on the local country station, and I made a mental note to share the lyrics with Rudy, if the subject ever came up.
“You may not like where I’m going,
But you sure know where I stand.
Hate me if you want to,
Love me if you can.”
Matt Bai covers national politics for the magazine (www.mattbai.com).
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09Giuliani-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin)
Good Allah, cutandpaste. Learn how to make a link.
Nope. If you cannot or do not wish to read stuff like that, ignore it.
How about some original thought then?
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