Does national security trump everything in GOP presidential politics?

August 22, 2006

Lee Bandy, South Carolina’s most revered political journalist, had an interesting item this week on the state Republican Party’s decision to host “An Evening Honoring Rudy Giuliani.” As the story goes, Giuliani’s presidential prospects are intact, even in a very conservative state like South Carolina, and despite the former NYC mayor’s liberal positions on several social issues, because national security trumps everything else.

Former state GOP chairman Barry Wynn said the party needs to take a fresh look at the way it regards new voters, especially those new residents who’ve settled along the coast and are starting to have an impact on state party politics.

Those voters tend to be more progressive in outlook and are more inclined to support someone like Giuliani. “I think Rudy could be more popular in South Carolina than most people would think,” Wynn said.

The debate in 2008 isn’t going to be about tax cuts, abortion or Social Security reform — Republican favorites. “The overarching issues this time will be national security and leadership,” Wynn said. “Everything else will fit under that.”

Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen, a GOP activist, said Giuliani can “get away with” supporting legalized abortion and gay rights because of his credibility on national security issues.

I’ll concede that I’m not in South Carolina, and Thigpen and Wynn are far closer to the state’s activist base than I am, but every indication suggests they’re completely wrong.

Take, for example an item that ran in New York magazine in 2004.

Katon Dawson, the South Carolina Republican chairman, touched all the politically correct bases when asked how Giuliani or Pataki would fare in the South Carolina Republican primary. Sure, they would have a chance to win, he said: “They both took America on its worst day, and made us better by the minute.” He helpfully pointed out that this is no small matter; no Republican has won the party’s nomination in recent times without capturing the South Carolina primary, he said.

Did he know that Pataki and Giuliani have been staunch supporters of gun control? “Well,” he drawled, “we are all supporters of the NRA in South Carolina.”

Was he aware that both men supported a woman’s right to an abortion? Dawson paused. “That is a litmus test in the South. That would be plowing new ground in South Carolina.”

And how about their support of some gay rights? There was no pause now. “A big stumbling block,” he said.

A big stumbling block, indeed. Throw in the fact Giuliani has a record of repeated adultery — including having marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade with his then mistress — and you have a recipe for some serious consternation from Bible Belt Republican primary voters. As a rule, this is a constituency that looks for ideological purity on all of the major issues — and we’re talking about a candidate who’s “wrong” about guns, abortion, marriage, and gays? And he’s running for the GOP nomination? Are you kidding?

For national security to trump all of this, Giuliani would’ve had to have prevented a terrorist attack personally, Jack-Bauer style. Indeed, it’s a delicate issue, but it’s probably worth remembering that Giuliani’s 9/11 halo is not without limits. By taking a leadership role the day of the attacks, Giuliani impressed nearly everyone. He demonstrated some leadership when people in New York City needed it. But does that make him an expert on national security policy? How, exactly?

It’s obviously early in the ’08 process, but I still find this notion that Giuliani’s leadership on 9/11 will somehow help him capture the Republican nomination to be fairly silly.

Just run the SNL skits of Rudy dressed in drag and he’d be toast.

  • “But does that make [Giuliani] an expert on national security policy? How, exactly?” – CB

    When exactly have the Republican’ts been concerned with expertise? 1990?

    This is pre-Boy George II talk CB. Get with the program. These people are all about fluff and not about substance.

  • There’s also the controversy over Giulani being a little reluctant to leave office when his term ended. Seemed he felt the city needed him to forego the electoral process. Sounds authoritarian enough for those Repubs who are willing to throw out our ideals for some illusory security.

  • National security expertise? Remember, Rudy’s superhuman 9/11 feats were performed without the aid of his energency command center, which had been in the WTC. We all know that a national security expert would not have constructed a command center in one of ther city’s prime terrorist targets. Oh, wait…

  • Did I miss something? When did New York City become a nation requiring its Mayor to exercise foreign policy?

    People seem to forget that on 9/10/2001 Rudy was somewhat of a joke in New York. He was in the midst of a messy divorce and was suffering from an unwillingness to do battle with Hillary Clinton in the 2000 election.But somehow 9/11 makes him Winston Churchill?

    Please give me a break. he is a total creation of an adoring media desparate to have a hero from the tragedy of 9/11.

  • When it comes to social issues–political and personal–Giuliani got “a hog truck” full of stink. I don’t know if there are big enough clothes pins for all of the noses of those Red-state Republicans.

  • If national security is all they have, they don’t have enough. It’s the economy stupid. Not to mention healthcare and loss of high quality jobs. I think the state of healthcare is the one thing that I keep hearing people, literally at my kitchen table, discussing fervently. Most of the people I know actually have insurance, but the coverage is usually inadequate and expensive.

  • For national security to trump all of this, Giuliani would’ve had to have prevented a terrorist attack personally, Jack-Bauer style.

    Delicious. Keep ’em coming like that, CB.

    I hope he lasts long enough to get seriously questioned about his essentially personal role in the destruction of 7 WTC, flagrantly violating the fire code with a huge diesel fuel tank without which the building would almost certainly have survived. (Google will find you many other sources for this information.)

  • Gun control? Reproductive choice? Gay rights? Marital infidelity? Well, yeah, I can see how those things could be a problem in a GOP primary, but surely Rudy’s fellow Republicans would never be so ungracious as to bring them up.

  • That will be the day when the Dobson/Farwell/Robertson crowd let’s the Republicans put up a divorced, pro abortion, pro gun control, and pro gay rights candidate for president.

    I can already feel the implosion of existence coming to a violent end.

  • Plus a recent M. A. Strippers Poll found that 89% of South Carolina Republicans thought Giuliani talked funny.

  • Ha! So true Dale. Conservative Carolinians don’t tend to like people who don’t think or speak exactly like they do. A bunch of Yankees may have moved to Hilton Head, but the Bob Joners in the Upstate will fight like they are fighting the devil himself. In fact, with his positions on abortion and gays they’ll consider him the devil himself. I’ll be completely shocked if Giuliani does well in the Republican primary.

  • Two things here stick out like sore thumbs, and suggest that Lee could be on to something.

    First, consider that recent anti-fundie actions by Republicans have floated well, even though they were blatant “slaps-in-the-face” to the Dobson gang and their ilk. This would suggest that the Bible-Belters are a great deal of talk, and not very much walk, in their not-so-subtle threats to walk away from the GOP over gay rights, women’s rights, immigration rights, gun control—everything that’s been traditionally the Right’s way of thinking. Litmus tests don’t seem to hold a great deal of water to some conservatives any more, now that the glitz and glimmer of “Pre-Jurassic Neoconservativism” is heading for extinction. It’s also important to remember that Republicans, after all, are the political enablers for their rabid little “war against Islamofascism”—and all that that implies.

    And second, there’s the issue of attracting the younger crowd—those who are somewhere to the left of the hardcore Kool-Aid Bushites; those who found themselves abandoned and burned by the fast-talk express of McCain; those who are embarrassed by the theocratic insanity of the wingnuts.

    Putting these two subcomponents together seems to be what Lee is using to formulate his model—and in theory, it’s a functional model of what the “next-gen Republican” might look like:

    1.) The next-gen Republican will forego the harrassments, threats, and monies from the uberfundies—and might even go so far as to eventually label that particular fringe-faction as being Theofascistic in nature. Such a move could bring in two new supporters from the center for every one supporter lost, and we all know that it’s not the money that they count on election night—it’s the votes.

    2.) With the abandonment of the far right Theofascist faction, the next-gen Republican will be decidedly further to the left than his/her current-model counterpart. This will create an impetus of centrism, opening the door to those who were voting for Dems in the past, due only to the Dems being the lesser of evils. Furthermore, the abandonment of the hardcore wingnuts has the potential to cause a paradigm shift in the way a lot of people view the two major parties. The GOP will have the aura of “having shaken off the special interest of fundamentalism,” and this could place undue negative emphasis on the special-interest factions of the Democratic Party itself.

    3.) The next-gen Republican will withdraw into the traditional “core” of GOP thinking—“Small Government” and “Fiscal Responsibility.” Fiscal Responsibility, by the way, will include the foundational concept of “having the ability to pay the bills when they’re due”—and this might lead to a reversal on some taxbreak packages for the hyperwealthy. It could even conceivably embrace the idea of single-payer healthcare—which would cost substantially less than having all of those private carriers ramping the cost of healthcare through the roof. Small Government might suggest that various government support programs for those in need could be handled in a more meaningful—and economical—fashion by one centralized agency—the Federal Government—than by a hodge-podge of faith-based organizations who have been implementing “their own series of ideological hoops” for applicants to jump through. The governmental contingent necessary for the adequate monitoring and supervision of these faith-based groups (comparable in several ways to Halliburton and the other corporate war-profiteers) would, in the end, be far larger than the governmental agencies that they replaced in the first place.

    Don’t count Bandy out on this one quite yet—he’s hit the nail on the head far too many times in the past, when “common wisdom” from both sides said something elementally different….

  • Reading all of the above comments, it suddenly struck me that while Rudy is Pro gun control, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, etc. today, by the time we get to the primary, maybe he won’t be. Lord knows we’ve seen these people display a certain willingness to, um, reconsider their positions on of these issues before.

  • I think you’re all missing one thing: Giuliani regularly kisses the rings of fundies. He endorsed Ken Blackwell in the GOP primary in Ohio. He hosted a Ralph Reed fund-raiser. He’s a non-fundie fundie the way Clinton was a non-black black president.

    And don’t forget his attack on allegedly sacrilegious art while he was mayor — that’s a pretty good imitation of fundie politics.

    He gives the Right a new jackboot fantasy (surely the past six years have taught us all that it doesn’t take much for righties to believe someone is a man on a white horse who can boldly lead). He seems to hate a lot of people righties hate. He’s way better at stirring up anger than McCain (see his convention speech). So don’t count him out. I think they may throw out their rulebook for him.

    (Oh, and you think they’d reject him for adultery? That’s only a dealbreaker when liberals do it.)

  • Steve, I don’t think the return to dominance of the “fiscal conservatives” will lead to a reconsideration of the tax cuts. Rather, they will break on the shoals of trying to eliminate social programs.

  • Well, Rudy Giuliani has some serious personal baggage that goes completely against the fundies’ “moralistic” beliefs. Or maybe screwing around on your wife with another woman in public and in the mayor’s mansion doesn’t qualify?

    Last time I checked, “Do not commit adultery” was #7 on the fundies’ top ten commandments. Or maybe that only applies if you’re a Democrat!

    Rudy and Newtie…you have some ‘splainin’ to do.

  • Rudy has credibility on national security, who knew? Sorry GOP hacks, being mayor of NYC on 9/11 does not give national security credibility, leadership credibility yes, national security no.

    Also, the multiple adultury items that are in the background right now becuase the next presidential election isn’t on the front burner, are going to be front and freakin’ center. The GOP thinks they can spin this or that people don’t remember are fooling themselves. Of course GOP voters often have pretzel logic so they might still be able to justify a vote for him despite his past “isues” that they wouldn’t have accepted from a Democrate (think Clinton).

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