On the one hand, it seems like the obvious way to derail Rudy Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is to point out how far out of the GOP mainstream he is on key domestic issues. There are five main areas of disagreement: abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, immigration, and personal mores. Given Giuliani’s record on all of them, it seems safe to label him a “moderate,” at least by contemporary Republican standards.
But on the other hand, these five issues to do not a description make. David Greenberg had a terrific piece over the weekend explaining that Giuliani is many things, but moderate isn’t one of them.
You wouldn’t know it from reading the papers, but the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination is a confirmed right-winger. On issues such as free speech and religion, secrecy and due process, civil rights and civil liberties, pornography and democracy, this moralist and self-styled lawman has exhibited all the key hallmarks of Bush-era conservatism.
That candidate is Rudolph W. Giuliani.
As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was “liberal” — and the second-to-last was “moderate.” With his take-many-prisoners approach to crime and his unerring pro-police instincts, the prosecutor-turned-proconsul made his mark on the city not by embracing its social liberalism but by trying to crush it.
This isn’t a case in which Giuliani is reasonable on domestic policy, but is hard-right when it comes to a neocon, warmongering worldview. The reality is, he’s offensive in both areas. Indeed, Greenberg highlighted the former mayor’s social positions that are frequently overlooked — and which are anything but progressive.
Consider the first of our freedoms: free speech. One emblematic act of Giuliani’s mayorship was his 1999 attempt to censor an art exhibit because it featured a painting of the Virgin Mary that used an unusual form of mixed media — clumps of elephant dung, to be precise. (Others were also upset by the cutouts of female genitalia.) Giuliani, a Catholic who attended parochial schools and once aspired to the priesthood, understandably took offense. But he then converted his religious sensibilities into policy, unilaterally withholding a $7 million city subsidy to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. When that failed to get the painting removed, he tried to evict the museum from its century-old home. Ultimately, after losing in court, he was forbidden to retaliate against the museum. So much for moderation.
Those who deem Rudy a liberal might also recall his plan to fund parochial schools with city money. His goal went far beyond letting Bible groups meet after hours in public classrooms: The mayor personally phoned Cardinal John O’Connor to hatch a plan that would have placed public school students in church-run schools with overtly Christian curricula — including catechism and excluding sex education. It was the real liberals on the school board who stopped the plan.
Beyond religious issues, a second conservative trait defined Giuliani’s tenure: his Cheney-esque appetite for executive power. In 1999, for example, he directed (without the City Council’s permission) the police to permanently confiscate the cars of people charged with drunken driving — even if the suspects were later acquitted.
Giuliani’s record on government secrecy, too, is hardly moderate. Liberals today routinely attack President Bush’s refusal to divulge information about his domestic wiretapping program and his 2001 executive order claiming the power to close presidential papers. But they rarely discuss an equally autocratic move that Giuliani made: cutting a deal with the city as he was leaving office to assign control of his mayoral records to his own private company so that he could decide who could see them.
The fanciful notion of Giuliani’s liberalism also omits the piece de resistance of his mayorship: his flagrantly undemocratic bid to stay in office for an extra three months after Sept. 11, 2001. During earlier crises, even World War II, U.S. elections had always managed to proceed normally. But Giuliani maneuvered for weeks to remain mayor after his term-limited exit date. Only as normalcy returned to New York did his power grab fail.
And that’s just domestic policy. On foreign policy, Giuliani seems to be downright looking forward to starting several additional wars.
As for the issues Giuliani is “good” on, he’s quickly becoming an opponent of abortion rights; he’s talking up his possible support for an anti-gay constitutional amendment; he’s told the NRA that 9/11 changed his views on gun control; and he’s denounced Bush’s immigration policy.
There’s simply nothing “moderate” about this guy.
As Greenberg concluded, “When Bush ran for president, his slippery slogan of ‘compassionate conservatism’ convinced many Washington journalists that he was a moderate. When he then pushed a right-wing agenda, they were stunned. They hadn’t looked hard enough at his record. Likewise, if Giuliani becomes president, he will probably emerge as an unabashed social conservative — as seen in his judicial appointments, his efforts to aid religious schools, the free hand he gives the government in fighting crime and terrorism, and an all-around authoritarian style. Let’s not get fooled again.”