Former Mayor of New York, Rudy Guiliani has defied all pundits and surged ahead in what has been call the popularity contest portion of the Republican campaign.
Newsweek
Maybe it is Giuliani time, after all. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has pulled far ahead of Arizona Sen. John McCain in a hypothetical head-to-head GOP presidential primary matchup, according to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll—beating McCain 59 percent to 34 percent. Giuliani's lead over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is even more formidable (70 percent to 20 percent).
But perhaps the best news for the man once dubbed "America's Mayor" for his role in seeing New York through the 9/11 attacks is the lead he's opened up on his potential Democratic rivals for the White House. According to the survey, Giuliani outpolls Illinois Sen. Barack Obama by 5 points (48 percent to 43 percent), former senator John Edwards by 2 points (47 percent to 45 percent) and Sen. Hillary Clinton by 1 point (47 percent to 46 percent). Last month Clinton led Giuliani by 3 points (49 percent to 46 percent), as did Obama (47 percent to 44 percent). Thirteen percent of registered Democrats say they would cross party lines to support Giuliani, while only 4 percent of Republicans say they would do the same for Clinton. Perhaps more important, among independent voters, Giuliani leads Clinton 49 percent to 42 percent.
[...]Among Democrats, Sen. Clinton remains a formidable front runner. She leads Obama by a double-digit margin (52 percent to 38 percent) and handily outpaces Edwards (63 percent to 32 percent). In a general-election heat against McCain, the Vietnam war hero who announced this week his intention to run for president on “The Late Show with David Letterman,†Clinton leads by only 1 point (47 percent to 46 percent). Interestingly, both Obama and Edwards fare slightly better against the Arizona senator—Obama by 2 points (45 percent to 43 percent) and Edwards, the Democrats' 2004 vice presidential nominee, by 5 points (48 percent to 43 percent).
Despite his lead in the NEWSWEEK Poll, Giuliani’s road to nomination may not necessarily be free and clear, especially among Republican hard-liners. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds that 58 percent of registered Republicans and “Republican leaners†describe themselves as social conservatives. Only a quarter (26 percent) of Republican voters claim to know “a lot†about the pro-choice and pro-gun-control Giuliani, while a full third (34 percent) admit to knowing little or nothing about him. A large number say that knowing where he stands on those issues and his opposition to a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage will hurt his chances with them: half (50 percent) of self-identified social conservatives say the candidate’s support of Roe v. Wade would at least make them less likely to support him. Almost half (44 percent) say the same of his opposition to a ban on same-sex marriage, and nearly a third (30 percent) say his stance on gun control could lead them to support someone else.
Why would a social policy liberal become a darling of Republicans? The reasons are imbedded in the detail of his history. He is thought of as a hero of 9/11, the man who rallied a City to respond to the first war-like attack on American soil. But Guliani made his reputation before 9/11.
Newsweek
Giuliani wouldn't rest until New York was safe. He ordered the NYPD to scale back its feel-good community-liaison projects and simply patrol the streets. As his police commissioner he recruited William Bratton, a media-friendly Boston police commissioner who subscribed to the "broken windows" approach to enforcement. The theory held that areas that tolerated small-time crime would eventually become havens for more-serious offenses. (A single broken window would lead to more broken windows, which would lead to squatters' breaking into a building.) Graffiti artists, loiterers and prostitutes became the targets of the swift hand of the law. Bratton introduced CompStat—a system for mapping real-time crime statistics to allocate policing resources more precisely and keep track of officers' performance. Questions persisted about whether pursuing squeegee men—panhandlers who washed the windows of cars waiting in traffic—was the best use of the mayor's and his police force's time. But the strategies seemed to work: by the end of Giuliani's first year, homicides in the city were down 18 percent.
New York was emerging from adversity and Giuliani wanted the credit. It was widely reported that he was enraged when Bratton appeared on the cover of a January 1996 Time magazine under the headline finally, we're winning the war against crime. Bratton stepped down from the NYPD within months. (Giuliani denied publicity was the issue; "Bratton didn't understand that he had a boss," says Giuliani friend Powers. "It's not a question of credit.") By this time, New Yorkers had grown accustomed to a mayor who loved combat—with allies and adversaries alike. "For Rudy, governing New York was conquering New York," says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. "He thrived on confrontation." As long as Rudy got results, the public didn't particularly care how he did it, or how many fights he picked. The squeegee men were gone, as were turnstile jumpers and the more notorious pornographic emporiums. In terms of quality of life, he delivered. The rest was just drama—drama that exhausted those involved, yes, but what mattered was New York was livable again. Suburban parents no longer automatically vetoed children's trips into the city. By the end of his first term, Giuliani had cut 20,000 workers from the city's payrolls, was dramatically reducing the welfare rolls and had violent crime approaching a 30-year low. The public rewarded him with 55 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 1997.
His city delivered from strife, Giuliani went, in John Quincy Adams's phrase, in search of monsters to destroy. Sometimes the mayor created them when a lot of people didn't think they really existed. Where to begin? First, there was the New York Magazine ad campaign in which the magazine called itself "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani banned the ad from city buses, prompting the magazine to sue, successfully, on the ground that the mayor had violated its First Amendment rights. Then there was the risqué Brooklyn Museum exhibit that included a portrait of the Virgin Mary that the artist had stained with a clump of elephant dung. Whatever one might think of the exhibit's artistic merits—and reasonable people could disagree—Giuliani went to war in a way even some of his friends found rhetorically extreme. Outraged, he responded as though the museum was poised to destroy Christendom. "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating someone else's religion," the mayor said. Some old supporters wondered if he'd lost his sense of proportion. "It was almost as if he became so enamored of his press," says Floyd Flake, a former Democratic congressman from Queens who supported Giuliani in 1993, "that he had to be solving something, even if there wasn't any problem to solve."
Guiliani is a scrapper, someone the hawks expect to continue the so-called war on terror. He appears to be a neo-con, someone who believes in the Bush Doctrine. Neo-cons see the fight with Al Qaeda as a distraction. Their target remains rogue nations, the Axis of Evil and any other country that supports the bad guys. Of course, there is a limit to this logic. While they focus on Iranian support of the Shia militias like the Mahdi Army of Sadr, they ignore the support Saudi Arabia sends to the Sunni insurgents. That is unlikely to change without a monumental shift to renewable sources of energy.
MercuryNews.com
The former two-term mayor held the packed hotel ballroom's attention as he gently attacked Democrats on the Iraq war and spoke generally on economic and education themes. He wrapped himself in the tax-cutting, evil-fighting "morning in America'' mantle of former President Ronald Reagan. "If we do it right with the spirit of America, the enemies that we think we have now in this war on terror are going to be friends of America'' (like post-war Germany and Japan became). "We'll get there with a Ronald Reagan kind of spirit -- peace through strength,'' he said to applause.
From conservative icon Weekly Standard:
"For a majority of the GOP primary electorate, it is the war, the war, the war (and judges)," writes the influential radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt. "The war on terror hasn't just changed Giuliani's profile as a crisis-leader," writes columnist Jonah Goldberg. "It's changed the attitudes of many Americans, particularly conservatives, about the central crisis facing the country. It's not that pro-lifers are less pro-life. . . . It's that they really, really believe the war on terror is for real. At conservative conferences, on blogs, and on talk radio, pro-life issues have faded in their passion and intensity. . . . Taken together, terrorism, Iraq, and Islam have become the No. 1 social issue." And the earth surely moved on February 21, when the writer Maggie Gallagher, as tough and principled as they come on abortion and marriage, allowed in her syndicated column that she just might consider the mayor. "I never voted for Rudy when I lived in New York City for one simple reason: abortion. . . . Why would I even think of changing my mind? Two things: national security, and Hillary Clinton's Supreme Court appointments." Keep your eyes out for more of these eye-popping moments. This one will not be the last.
From a supposed liberal newspaper, the Los Angeles Times:
Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph W. Giuliani praised President Bush's war leadership on Saturday and mocked supporters of a nonbinding congressional resolution condemning the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq. The former New York City mayor came to Bush's defense as he promoted his White House candidacy at a California Republican convention. Drawing parallels between Iraq and America's Civil War, Giuliani compared Bush's political troubles to Abraham Lincoln's. When the Civil War was unpopular, Giuliani said, Lincoln "kept his eye ahead." "He was able to say, 'I know my people are frustrated, and I know my people are angry at me.' " But after weighing public opinion, Lincoln had "that ability that a leader has — a leader like George Bush, a leader like Ronald Reagan — to look into the future," Giuliani said.
Giuliani's defense of the currently unpopular president comes as he is portraying himself as a decisive leader unafraid to buck public opinion. "The great moral issue of Ronald Reagan's time was defeating communism, and he understood that," said Giuliani, whose national popularity burgeoned after he led New York through the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The great moral issue of our time is defeating terrorism."
Back to a conservative bellweather, the National Review Online:
Republican primary voters should rally around the GOP field’s most accomplished supply-sider, the all-but-announced Rudolph W. Giuliani. Having sliced taxes and slashed Gotham’s government, New York’s former mayor is the leading fiscal conservative among 2008’s GOP presidential contenders.
[...]Conservatives seeking a proven leader to lasso taxes and rein in runaway spending have a natural choice for president: Rudolph W. Giuliani.
With John McCain well documented as a waffler, Republican voters could very well support Guiliani, if there is another terrorist attack, or if the confrontation with Iran heats up. The latter possibility seems the most likely outcome. Should the radical Right-wing Christians get their "clash of civilizations", Guiliani may be their standard bearer.
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