Rudy: A Problem-Solver Whose Time Is Now

National Review

David Frum

This is a difficult hour for the United States. It’s not just the strain of war. On domestic issues, too, discontent runs strong. The incomes of ordinary Americans have stagnated over the past six years. Health-care and energy costs have surged. In many cities, gang violence has surged. Over two-thirds of Americans now describe the country as “on the wrong track” — astonishing for a non-recession year.

In this difficult hour, the Bush administration seems to have lost its way — and its nerve. On issues ranging from the reconstruction of New Orleans to the Iranian bomb, the administration seems paralyzed, crippled almost as much by a lack of positive ideas as by the president’s record-scraping personal unpopularity.

Historically, Americans have trusted Republicans as the party of prudence and sound management. Iraq, Katrina, earmarks, and airport body searches of Eagle Scouts and wheelchair-bound grandmas have corroded that reputation. As a party, we are now widely perceived as uncaring, improvident, corrupt, and incompetent. Republican identification has sharply slumped, and Democrats enjoy large advantages in almost every way pollsters can measure.

The conditions are all in place for an epochal Republican disaster in 2008. Unless something happens to change the game radically, we are looking at a real possibility of a big Democratic presidential win combined with gains in both houses of Congress, an outcome that has not occurred since 1964. Democrats are beginning to talk of a new government health-care monopoly paid for by canceling the Bush tax cuts.

These are not pleasant facts, but they are facts all the same. They present us as conservatives and Republicans with the toughest challenges we have faced in years. How can we hold the line on government while addressing America’s genuine health-care needs? How can we sustain the competitiveness of the American economy against a Democratic Congress quivering to impose new taxes and new regulations? How can we win a war on terror that the congressional majority seems already to have written off as lost?

Rudy Giuliani is the answer to these challenges.

No living elected official has solved more public problems with more outstanding success than Rudy Giuliani. If there is one person Americans associate with competence in government, it is Rudy. As the primary race has warmed up, some have tried to diminish the mayor’s accomplishments. But in fact, the closer you look, the more amazing they become.

Yes, the crime rate for the whole country declined in the 1990s. But New York, with a little less than 3 percent of the nation’s population, accounted for 15 percent of the nation’s decline in homicides. Much of the improvement in former high-crime zones like Chicago, Washington, and Miami occurred precisely because New York’s success inspired other mayors to follow where Giuliani had led.

It is not just crime. Giuliani restored civility to New York’s public spaces, reformed welfare, broke the grip of organized crime on trash collection and food wholesaling, restored academic standards in the city university system, chased the sex industry off the streets, held the line on taxes, and set in motion one of the greatest property booms in city history.

In 1963, President Kennedy challenged those who suggested that Communism could out-compete freedom: “Let them come to Berlin.” Today, Republicans can challenge those who assert that liberals can out-manage conservatives: “Let them come to New York.”

Giuliani achieved his success by combining a fierce commitment to core values with an impressive flexibility in his methods. He listened to advice, tried experiments, built on what worked, discarded what did not work. He showed that a leader can be strong without being rigid.

Giuliani’s accomplishment was put to the ultimate test on 9/11. Compare what happened in New York that day with what happened in New Orleans four years later. The mayor did not panic. Public order was consistently maintained. There was no looting, no lawbreaking, no criminal activity. An evacuation of about half a million people from lower Manhattan proceeded smoothly and safely. The local economy recovered almost immediately. The disaster zone has not only recovered, but erupted into new life.

Giuliani’s record is the best possible reply to Democratic criticisms of Republican governance. It is also the best hope to recover lost supporters. Giuliani’s urban ethnic background resonates in key states like Florida and New Jersey, where local polling suggests he does best among the leading Republicans in head-to-head matchups against Hillary Clinton.

Romney, Thompson, McCain, and Huckabee are candidates of many excellences. But they cannot possibly hope to win in a year like 2008. Rudy Giuliani can do more than hope.

If elected, Rudy Giuliani would start his presidency with more knowledge of world leaders and world problems than almost any of his recent predecessors started with. He has been dealing with terrorism since his days as a federal prosecutor; he led a city where one out of every ten private-sector workers is employed by a foreign company. True, he lacks the gilded foreign-policy résumé of a George H. W. Bush. But compared with any other recent president, Giuliani has traveled more, met more foreign leaders, and thought more deeply about international problems. He will carry forward the foreign-policy goals declared by President George W. Bush — but with enough distance from that administration that he will be able to try new methods. This is not a contest that conservatives can afford to take lightly: To lose the 2008 election is probably to lose the war in Iraq.

Most Republicans agree with most of these positive assessments of Giuliani. Yet many continue to hold back, for reasons like those forcefully articulated by Hadley Arkes in an influential recent article: “The nomination and election of Rudy Giuliani would mark the end of the Republican party as the pro-life party in our politics.”

This is exactly wrong. Yes, there are Republicans who want to chase pro-lifers and other social conservatives out of the party. But Giuliani has emphatically taken a very different view. He has extended welcome to pro-life conservatives in almost every way a candidate for president can. He has promised to appoint federal judges who take the Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito view of the Constitution. He has pledged that as president he would do his utmost to persuade Americans to turn away from abortion and toward adoption. He has declared his personal revulsion at abortion. He has stated over and over that pro-life conservatives will have his respect and attention.

Giuliani may not speak about life issues with the fervor and eloquence of a George W. Bush. But for all practical purposes, what he would actually do would look very similar to what George W. Bush actually has done. Maybe even better: Remember, Giuliani will be taking advice on judges from Theodore Olson — whereas Bush’s first choice for the Alito seat was Harriet Miers.

Arkes offers pro-life conservatives this practical advice: “It is conceivable, then, that from the standpoint of the pro-lifers it might be better to lose to Hillary Clinton than to win with Rudy Giuliani.”

Does this make sense? Here we are at a breakthrough moment for the pro-life cause. Four judges on the Supreme Court believe Roe was wrongly decided. A fifth is approaching his 90th birthday. The number of abortions carried out annually in America has dropped by about 300,000 over the past 15 years, and public opinion is slowly shifting in a pro-life direction. And this is the moment you want to lose?

Think what the consequences of losing would be for the pro-life cause: The next eight years are likely to see the first beginnings of scientific tinkering with the human genetic code. Neo-eugenics will become a real possibility. We may have, luckily, escaped an ethical dilemma on stem cells, but there are plenty more dilemmas to come. The rules that get written in 2009–2017 are likely to set the nation’s moral compass for a long time to come. Do you really want Hillary Clinton to be the president who writes those rules?

Remember, we will probably face Democratic Congresses at least until 2013. The pro-life cause will be on defense — and when you are under fire, isn’t Rudy Giuliani the guy you want on your side? He’s the candidate who brings the gun to the knife fight, who defies pressure groups, and who makes it a point of honor not just to demand loyalty — but to return it.

Something similar might be said about Giuliani on gun rights. It’s true that as mayor of New York, in the middle of a crack war, Giuliani supported restrictions on automatic weapons. It’s equally true that since 1994, gun control has vanished as an issue in federal politics — very largely because Americans are so much less frightened of crime than they were in 1994. It was Giuliani’s success in New York that did more than anything to take guns off the Democratic agenda. In practical political terms, Rudy Giuliani is the best friend gun owners ever had.

On same-sex marriage, Giuliani’s view is identical to that of most Republican politicians — and indeed most of the editors of National Review: civil unions yes, marriage no.

On immigration, Giuliani’s views are more permissive than most of us at National Review would prefer. But they represent a huge improvement over the status quo. Today, the immigration laws are barely enforced at all: By 2008, some 10 million people will have migrated to the U.S. during the Bush years, more than half of them illegally. The large majority will be very low-skilled people who will consume much more in benefits than they will pay in taxes. Over the longer term, we need to shift from lower-skilled to higher-skilled immigration. But the immediate need is to stop illegal migration by effective enforcement of existing laws, using new technologies that identify who is and who is not entitled to work in the United States. Giuliani has promised to do that — and if there is one thing he has proven he can do, it is enforce laws.

This is a wartime election. It is an election that will decide between a free, competitive health system and a government monopoly. It will decide whether taxes rise, whether the swing seat on the Supreme Court goes to a liberal or a conservative, whether illegal aliens get enforcement or amnesty. This is not an election that conservatives can afford to lose. But it is an election we will lose if we refuse to face realities.

We must avoid the mistake we made in 1996, when we picked a candidate because he made us feel comfortable — with little regard to how the majority of Americans would feel about him. When Americans look at our array of candidates on the stage, they see only one president up there. That’s the president we should offer them.

Mr. Frum, an NR contributing editor, is the author of the forthcoming book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. He is an unpaid senior policy adviser to the Giuliani presidential campaign.