Giuliani '08?

From The New Republic's Thomas B. Edsall:

...Texas does not rank among the top five states in donations for either Mitt Romney or McCain, and no Texas metropolitan area is a major source of cash for their bids. By contrast, for Giuliani, Texas ranks third--behind New York and California--while Dallas and Houston place second and fourth on his list of top donor cities.

Another element of the Reagan tradition to which Giuliani can lay claim--and that bolsters his chance of winning the nomination--is his appeal to white, working-class voters: the Reagan Democrats who became the angry white men of the 1990s. Their switch to the GOP fractured the class basis of the New Deal coalition, and they have been crucial to every Republican presidential victory since 1968. These are Giuliani's people. He is pro-cop, anti-Sharpton, the mayor whose meritocratic streak led him to end the open admissions policy at the City University of New York. He stood in a flat-bed truck in front of City Hall in 1992 and told 10,000 beer-drinking cops that a proposed civilian review board was "bullshit" designed "to protect David Dinkins's political ass." He famously lectured a mother whose son had been killed in a hail of police bullets, "Maybe you should ask yourself some questions about the way he was brought up and the things that happened to him"--rhetoric that harkened back to George Wallace's insistence that the government stop "coddling" criminals because they "didn't have enough asparagus as a child." Giuliani was the tough guy who restored order to a city verging on chaos by breaking the back of the liberal interest groups that had once dominated local politics; and many white, lower- and middle-income voters in the outer boroughs loved him for it. They, more than any other factor, are the reason he was twice elected mayor of one of the country's most Democratic cities. And their hero now uses the same tough rhetoric that he once used to talk about criminals to talk about terrorists.

Giuliani's brand of conservatism also speaks to the Republican longing for managerial competence--something that has been woefully lacking under Bush. The statistics from Giuliani's tenure in New York suggest that he knows how to get results: Under his leadership, the city's murder rate fell by 63 percent; overall crime declined by 52 percent; vehicle thefts dropped by 71 percent; the number of children in foster care fell by 34 percent; the welfare case load declined by 59 percent; unemployment dropped by 40 percent; construction permits rose by 51 percent; and personal income rose by 53 percent. Of course, Giuliani's role in improving life for New Yorkers has almost certainly been overstated--most of all by Giuliani himself. The city's drop in crime was part of a national trend that actually began under Dinkins, and the economic boom of the '90s didn't hurt, either. What's more, Giuliani's managerial diligence is inseparable from his authoritarian streak, perhaps the least appealing aspect of his persona. Still, deserved or not, Giuliani's reputation as a skilled manager has been a very real asset in his campaign so far, allowing him to criticize Bush credibly on Iraq--the issue that, more than any other, symbolizes this administration's managerial shortcomings. "Here's what I would change," Giuliani told Larry King when asked how he would have handled the assault on Iraq. "Do it with more troops, maybe 100,000, 150,000 more." Giuliani harkens back to a time when Republicans were perceived as more competent, sober administrators than Democrats--and he affirms the nagging suspicion of many rank-and-file conservatives that Iraq could have been a stunning success if only George W. Bush weren't such a buffoon.

ut perhaps the most striking way in which Giuliani captures the mood of contemporary Republican politics has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with strategy. Both Reagan and Bush were masters of polarization. They calculated that it would be better to win by one vote, with a clear policy mandate, than to try to bring along a less committed 60 percent of the electorate with an appeal to consensus and compromise. In 2004, this strategy became clearer than ever, as Republicans sought to capitalize on deepening chasms between left and right. Deliberate polarization may or may not prove an effective strategy in the 2008 general election, but it is deeply attractive to conservative GOP primary voters whose antipathy to liberalism is intense.

Giuliani's entire career has been built on a willingness to polarize. Consider the vote totals in different neighborhoods in 1993, when he ousted Dinkins, New York's first black mayor. The election was close--Giuliani won by fewer than 50,000 votes--but the overall tally masked bitter partisan and racial divides. In heavily minority Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Dinkins won by margins of 38 to one. Meanwhile, Giuliani carried predominantly white Staten Island's South Shore by twelve to one, Howard Beach and Ozone Park by five to one, and Bensonhurst by eight to one. And, once he took office, Giuliani only seemed to grow more eager to stoke divisions through repeated head-on collisions with icons of the left, welfare-rights organizations, and the aclu. Indeed, if there is one hallmark of Giuliani's career as a prosecutor and mayor, it is his compulsion to fight without restraint--whether the enemy is the mafia, the education establishment, or his estranged second wife.

Giuliani is now pursuing the same strategy of sowing division, only this time on a national level. To hear him tell it, the election will pit weak-kneed Democrats against hard-line Republicans. "I listen a little to the Democrats, and, if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," he recently told an audience in New Hampshire. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation, and we will be back to our preSeptember 11 attitude of defense."

There is good reason to believe this rhetoric will win over a portion of GOP voters. As Rick Perlstein has pointed out in The New Republic, at a moment when conservatism is philosophically adrift--among other problems, it is currently tethered to an unsuccessful war, one whose premises may not have been all that conservative in the first place--the single thing that truly unites and energizes conservatives is a raw animosity toward liberals. With so many Republican policies having failed over the past six years, contemporary conservatism is less interested in policy and more defined by style. Nothing characterizes that style quite as well as bashing liberals. And Giuliani knows how to bash liberals. Neither McCain nor Romney nor even Newt Gingrich can match Rudy's record in confronting the ideological enemies on conservatism's Most Wanted list. It is in this climate that the tendency to say and do impolitic things--a characteristic that might ordinarily be seen as a drawback for a candidate--has become perhaps Rudy's greatest strength.