Chickenhawks Hawk "Metro Republicans"

From The Weekly Standard:

Here are the three leading candidates for president in the Republican party, a party based in the South and in the interior, rural in nature, and backed in large part by social conservatives: the senior senator from Arizona, a congenital maverick with friends in the press and a habit of dissing the base of his party; the former governor of deep-blue Massachusetts, son of a Michigan governor, a Mormon who looks, sounds, and comes across as a city boy; and the former mayor of New York, the Big Apple itself, ethnic and Catholic, pro-choice and pro-gun control, married three times, and a man who--Neil Simon, where are you?--moved in with a gay friend and his partner when he was thrown out of Gracie Mansion by his estranged and enraged second wife.

None hails from the South, none looks or sounds country, none is conspicuous for traditional piety, and none is linked closely to social conservatives. At the same time, none is exactly at odds with social conservatives either. None is a moderate, in the sense of being a centrist on anything or wary of conservatives; rather, each is a strong conservative on many key issues, while having a dissident streak on a few. Each has a way of presenting conservative views that centrists don't find threatening, and projecting fairly traditional values in a language that secular voters don't fear. In a country that has been ferociously split into two near-equal camps of voters for at least the past decade, this is no small accomplishment, as it suggests the potential to cross cultural barriers, and therefore extend one's own reach. If one of these men wins, it may mark a return to broader, national parties. And the iconic map of the recent elections, with the blue states draped like a shawl over the broad, red shoulders of Middle America, may give way to more subtle designs.

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McCain, Romney, and Giuliani aren't quite your "normal" conservative candidates, which is both their strength and an opportunity for their party. Each could be seen as running either to the right or the left of the other two, depending on what issues are most salient. On defense, McCain is the über-hawk, and on spending, he is well to the right of the president. Then, there are the other issues, like immigration and campaign finance reform, about which the less said the better, from the point of view of the conservative base. Romney lacks the war-on-terror credentials of McCain and the mayor, but he is a fiscal conservative (who refused to raise taxes in the state of Taxachusetts), to the right of McCain and Giuliani on immigration and campaign finance reform, way to the right of Giuliani on most social issues, and on some to the right of McCain. He backs the federal amendment to outlaw gay marriage, and has fought the use of embryos for stem cell research, leading National Review's John J. Miller to observe that he has "done his best to defend the culture of life on . . . the most inhospitable terrain in the country."

The pitfall for Romney is being perceived as Slick Mitt. In 1994, when running for the Senate against Edward M. Kennedy, he made this Clintonesque statement: "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal. . . . I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice." Running for governor in 2002, he defined himself personally as no longer pro-choice, but said in a survey, "Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine."

Against this background, McCain's record stands out as a model of clarity, but he has his problems with music, not words. He is the only one of the three to have been pro-life consistently, but he is also the one who in the 2000 campaign made a seemingly gratuitous attack on the religious right and its leaders, calling them "forces of evil," though he has since made his peace. Would-be supporters complain he is "tone-deaf," at least when it comes to their feelings. He jokes that the mainstream media are his base. He has recently stopped twisting his thumbs in the eyes of people who might otherwise back him, but some still resent what they see as his attitude. The Mormon and Maverick are both an odd lot when it comes to the way the base views them. And that's where the Mayor comes in.

Giuliani is not only pro-choice, but also anti-gun and gay-friendly, an urban cowboy who marches in gay rights parades (just like a Democrat), and appears in drag at a correspondents' assembly, though looking less like the plausible Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie than like Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot. This should count him out in the South, and with social conservatives--but so far, at least, it has not. How come? Because they admire him despite his stance on those litmus-test issues. Indeed, they see him in some key respects as a fellow social conservative who brought law and order to a city in crisis, the head-banging crime fighter who bonded with cops, flushed the porn shops out of Times Square, and protested loudly when a dung-draped Madonna was shown at the expense of the public at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He has endeared himself to conservatives everywhere by taking on, and often defeating, the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union. He is the enemy and the antithesis of the therapy culture that is at the core of the modern liberal project, the foe of relativism and friend of retribution and punishment, when it is called for. The word evil doers would not seem strange on his lips.

Giuliani's accomplishment in hosing down a sink of a city that some people think could have passed for Gomorrah has allowed him to bond with the base of his party as no other figure has done. And no one else emerged from the events of September 11 in quite the same way, as both a wartime leader and in some ennobling way as a survivor of the attacks, too. "Giuliani can't do southern preacher," wrote Hanna Rosin, the former religion writer for the Washington Post, "yet there's a current of spirituality running through his speech on the subject of 9/11, and how that day shattered and changed him [as] he stood watching debris fall from the Twin Towers, and realized that it was, in fact, people jumping. He was lost, without a plan. . . . Yet somehow he found sources of inspiration and strength. He remembered what he'd always known: 'the value of teamwork,' the need to 'be there when the going gets tough.' . . . Giuliani does not mention God, except once, in a joke. But his speech is infused with the kind of uplifting message that these days shares boundaries with preaching. 'You've got to care about people. . . . You've got to love them,' he says." What he has done is to give a religious speech that appeals to his base without alarming a larger audience. In the end, few seem to be thinking of guns, or abortion, or gays.

Professional analysts, both liberal and conservative, keep insisting that Giuliani will never survive the Republican primaries. Non-professionals sense something different. In December 2004, blogger Hugh Hewitt, who speaks frequently to groups of conservative activists, began taking informal polls of his audiences, and found Giuliani sweeping three-fourths of the field. At Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan began polling his readers, with similar results. "I consider myself a 'religious right' person, and am nonetheless enthused about Rudy," read a typical email, and others hit notes that were similar: "I disagree with Giuliani on some issues, but I can live with honest disagreements, having tremendous respect for his character and judgment."

What's causing this temperance on the right-to-life watch? A combination of things. There's the undoubted urgency of the war and peace issue; the fact that a pro-choice Republican elected by the votes of pro-lifers and indebted to them would act differently than a pro-choice Democrat elected with the help of the abortion-rights lobbies; and the understanding that Rudy is in no way personally hostile to social conservatives. As John Podhoretz noted in the New York Post, "past 'liberal' GOP candidates and would-be candidates have sought the nomination by taking strong stands counter to the views of the party's conservative base." Unlike Rudy, "those candidates . . . were engaging in battle against the social conservatives. They were fighting a culture war within the GOP." As a law-and-order conservative, Giuliani would be unlikely to name liberals to the bench, and he has written that Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts are the kind of justices he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Will that be enough to quell the fears of some social conservatives that a Giuliani-led Republican party would be a betrayal of the issues they hold dear?

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So there they all are--a hawkish war hero who holds Goldwater's seat but who charms independents; a Mormon from Michigan who will run his campaign from North Boston; and a pro-choice New Yorker who thrills southern social conservatives--all trying to be Reagan's heir. And let us recall that Reagan himself was a complex enough figure: a man who was divorced and remarried (as are McCain and Giuliani), a former film star and a recovering Democrat, from Illinois by way of Hollywood, who signed a liberal abortion bill while governor of California, was comfortable with gays in his film making milieu, and once even backed the New Deal.

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