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Sunday, March 04, 2007
# Posted 11:29 PM by Ariel David Adesnik
Assuming that he'd be running against the blue-collar, socially conservative Democrat Ed Koch, Giuliani cast himself as a liberal. Playing against his tough-guy image, he spent his first months on the campaign trail talking about the victims of homelessness and AIDS and drug abuse, causes that united elite liberals and poor minority voters while leaving the city's shrinking middle class cold...Not a pleasnt memory, but probably ancient history as far as 2008 is concerned. More relevant are the strengths that Giuliani brings to the table this time around: His genius wasn't for cutting government ("down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," as [Grover] Norquist famously put it) but rather for reforming it and making it work for the working and middle-class taxpayers who elected him, rather than elite liberals who had run City Hall into the ground. He offered a municipal version of the reformism that governors like Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson (who passed on his welfare czar to Giuliani) and Michigan's John Engler pursued at the state level in the 1990s--a conservatism targeted explicitly to voters who wanted to keep the welfare state in place but didn't want the Democrats to run it.I think competence is going to be a big issue in 2008, because even a lot of Republicans feel that it went AWOL during the Bush administration. Although there's no reason to think John McCain is incompetent, it's always harder for a legislator to demonstrate competence as opposed to a candidate who has served as a cheif executive. As for McCain, Ross & Reihan write that he: Tends to embrace the elite media's pet causes, from campaign finance reform to the patient's bill of rights, a Giuliani "respect conservatism" would be proudly anti-elitist, emphasizing issues that resonate with working and middle class Americans.That strikes me as a little unfair. One might even say that McCain trasformed campaign finance into the elite media's pet cause, not to mention a signature issue for himself. More generally, I think it's going to be hard to paint John McCain as an elitist. It is possible for conservatives to paint him as too moderate or too liberal, but those kinds of attack would hardly justify nominating Giuliani. Labels: John McCain, Rudy Giuliani (4) opinions -- Add your opinion
Comments:
"I think it's going to be hard to paint John McCain as an elitist."
I don't think it'll be that difficult. McCain was a naval officer. The Navy is the service that most distinguished between "officers" and "men" (a holdover, I suspect, from the British Navy in which officers were recruited only from the titled), and a pilot, who are the elite, and let everybody know it. That background often shows as arrogance when anyone questions him, and those moments can easily be assembled into a narrative which portrays him as such.
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