A tough flip-flop to pull off

August 14, 2007

When it comes to abortion rights, Rudy Giuliani can avoid the subject and talk about “strict constructionist” judges. When it comes to gay rights, he can try to find some wiggle room between his previous (read: genuine) beliefs and his new (read: pandering) beliefs.

But when it comes to immigration, Giuliani might find the flip-flop much harder to pull off.

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani vowed Tuesday to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States by closely tracking visitors to the country and beefing up border security.

“We can end illegal immigration. I promise you, we can end illegal immigration,” the former New York mayor said at a community center [in South Carolina] — the first of the day’s two stops in this early voting state. […]

Rival Mitt Romney has criticized Giuliani on immigration, arguing that he supported illegal immigration when he was mayor — a charge Giuliani rejected.

Romney said last week that Giuliani “instructed city workers not to provide information to the federal government that would allow them to enforce the law. New York City was the poster child for sanctuary cities in the country.”

The tricky part of this, of course, is that Romney happens to be right.

The New York Daily News reported today that Giuliani just borrowed Ed Koch’s immigration policy, and basically embraced ideas that most Republicans in 2007 would find abhorrent.

[As mayor, Giuliani] was considered one of the most immigrant-friendly government executives in the nation — in both word and deed.

He maintained the city’s longstanding immigration policy – begun under Koch and maintained by former Mayor David Dinkins – which guaranteed immigrants access to schools, health care and the police without regard to their status.

“He is repudiating the good things that he did [as mayor], to his shame,” Koch, a frequent critic of Giuliani’s, said yesterday.

Then-Mayor Giuliani also rarely missed a chance to extol the virtues of the immigrants’ struggle.

“Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens,” Giuliani said in 1994. “If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people who we want in this city.”

Two years later, when asked his view of a Suffolk County bill to make English the official language, he responded, “There’s no reason to pass a bill like this, except maybe to exclude people, insult people or offend people.”

Usually, when listing the reasons Giuliani can’t win the GOP nomination, the first two issues are gays and abortion. They’re immediately followed by guns and his scandalous family life, with his distaste for discussing religion rounding out the top five.

But given the recent political climate, immigration alone could ruin Giuliani’s chances. He’s now trying to move to the right quickly, but unless he’s prepared to denounce everything he said, did, and believed as mayor, it’s yet another high hurdle he’ll struggle to clear.

Honestly, I wish the right would stop bashing on this. It shouldn’t be up to emergency rooms or schools or police to determine who’s overstayed their visa.

And we could have tougher border enforcement and better tracking of visitors without deputizing the police.

It really shouldn’t be an if/or situation. The INS and SSD needs to set up databases that are highly controlled with one-way gates so that employers and agents and visitors and workers can get their information up to day.

Currently is it impossible for a visitor to know their immigration status from day to day, let alone the police, emergency rooms, schools, etc. Why are we pretending as though it was?

  • There are hundreds of rational reasons why Giuliani won’t win the nomination, most of which have to do either with things he did and said in order to win here in NYC, some relating to his vile personal life–the adultery, the estrangement from his kids, etc–and the last few having to do with his failures on and after 9/11 (the supposed source of his strength).

    There’s just one that explains why he will win the nomination: all that unites the Republican Party anymore is how much they hate us, the liberals. And nobody Brings the Hate like Rudy. In this respect, as in a few others (authoritarian tendencies, most notably), he is actually worse than Bush. Rudy isn’t a well man, and his personal neuroses mirror those of the party he wants to lead. Sadly, I think he’ll get the big stage from which to spew his vitriol.

  • Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like there is more flip-flopping and pandering and outright lying about positions among the Republican field than among the Democratic field, and the flip-flops are not the subtle, nuanced kind that can be wiggled out of using semantics as an excuse; they are clear and significant changes in position.

    Now, that being said, I respect the right of every person to change his or her mind – there are things I feel differently about from the perspective of my 50’s than I did when I was in my 30’s, and if we all aren’t undergoing the kind of evolutionary thinking that comes with life experience, I have to wonder if we’re missing something.

    The kinds of things these people are changing their minds on do not seem to fit the category of evolutionary thinking, but of political strategizing – i.e., where are the votes? Thirteen years ago, Mitt Romney said he was moved to believe in a woman’s right to choose after his brother-in-law’s girlfriend died from a botched abortion. Today, he claims that the fate of embryos that might be used for stem-cell research moved him to the side of being against that choice. It seems hard to believe that he would change a position for a clump of cells and ignore the fate of someone – a living, breathing fully-formed life – that he actually knew.

    Giuliani re-writes his history on almost a daily basis, elevating his importance to the city of New York, attempting to extrapolate experience he never really had, and participation he never really experienced, into the global arena as an expert on terrorism, without even really being sure who the payers are.

    Now, as he wants to move from the local to national level, he wants to do a 180 on immigration, and he’s doing it because that’s where the conservative votes are – and all those immigrants he was in favor of in New York cannot vote – so what is their use to him.

    What does continue to amaze me is the way these people function as though there are not reams of printed material and hours of video- and audiotape of them espousing these very different positions; with Giuliani, it is as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning that he will switch out one position for another.

  • dajafi, I hope you are correct. in many ways, i think Roodee is easier to beat in a general than Oven Mitt. i think this is certainly true if HRC is the D candidate; he just doesn’t match up well with her — the people of Ne wYork who know them both best prefer her by a fair margin — and Team Clinton would have a field day with his baggage. Roodee would make her look as likable and articulate as Bill, which takes a little doing.

  • Zeitgeist, I have to admit that the *only* scenario in which I’d vote for the Empress is if she’s squaring off against Rudy… if choosing between despots, might as well pick the rational one.

    You make a great point that the Clinton machine probably would tear him apart in a most effective way. That said, I remain concerned that the combination of his rage and hatred, and her status as Enemy Number One to the rightist base, would create a campaign that would make 1988 and 2004 look like the fourth grade student council election.

  • I think there is a segment of the electorate that hates Clinton, and they are no doubt the people to whom Rudy will have the most appeal, but I think that particular segment is not as large as you might think.

    It’s also likely that Clinton won’t have to tear Rudy down, because his fellow Republican contenders are going to have to start doing that themselves if they want to get the nomination. In fact, there are so many more ways the GOP contenders can savage each other before the Dems even need to take a crack at them, it may be all but over for them by the time we hit March, 2008. I agree that it’s going to be ugly, but I think the ugliness will be among the GOP and not so much between the GOP and DEm nominees.

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