Giuliani, the ‘Nixon Republican’
Rudy Giuliani is “Nixon’s political twin,” writes former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in his latest Washington Post column. Gerson elaborates:
In his elections, Nixon appealed to conservatives and the country as a culture warrior who was not a moral or religious conservative. “Permissiveness,” he told key aides, “is the key theme,” and Nixon pressed that theme against hippie protesters, tenured radicals and liberals who bad-mouthed America. This kind of secular, tough-on-crime, tough-on-communism conservatism gathered a “silent majority” that loved Nixon for the enemies he made.
By this standard, Giuliani is a Nixon Republican. He is perhaps the most publicly secular major candidate of either party — his conflicts with Roman Catholic teaching make him more reticent on religion than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But as a prosecutor and mayor of New York, he won conservative respect for making all the right enemies: the ACLU, advocates of blasphemous art, purveyors of racial politics, Islamist mass murderers, mob bosses and the New York Times editorial page.
Gerson worries that Giuliani, like Nixon, is “a talented man without an ideological compass, mainly concerned with the accumulation of power.”
Just to underscore the point that he thinks nominating Rudy Giuliani for president would be a really, really bad idea, Gerson adds that he fears nominating a Republican who is “in direct conflict with the Roman Catholic Church.” He writes:
Giuliani is not only pro-choice. He has supported embryonic stem cell research and public funding for abortion. He supports the death penalty. He supports “waterboarding” of terror suspects and seems convinced that the conduct of the war on terrorism has been too constrained. Individually, these issues are debatable. Taken together, they are the exact opposite of Catholic teaching, which calls for a “consistent ethic of life” rather than its consistent devaluation. No one inspired by the social priorities of Pope John Paul II can be encouraged by the political views of Rudy Giuliani. Church officials who criticized John Kerry on abortion are anxious for the opportunity to demonstrate their bipartisanship by going after a Republican. Those attacks on Giuliani have already begun.
