One thing I notice a lot when talking to other liberals about the upcoming Republican primaries is that Giuliani’s popularity baffles them. My money is still on him as the winner of the nomination, and not just because of 9/11 blather. Paul Krugman puts his finger on it.
And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.
In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who.
We have a winner! It’s a well-worn right wing myth that Giuliani “cleaned up” NYC with heavy use of the boot on the necks of non-white residents of the city. Most of see the shooting of Amadou Diallo as a political liability, but with the Republican base, I’d suggest that it’s in the plus column for a lot of voters.
50 Responses to “Why Rudy could win”
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The idea that he reduced NYC’s crime rate is going to be tough to debunk. But the fact is that it started falling near the end of Dinkin’s tenure and continued to fall under Giuliani. His policy of giving the cops free reign over darker-skinned residents had shit to do with the crime drop because it fell drastically in other big cities too during the same time period.
The crime boom in the 80s was the result of Reaganomics and crack cocaine. The shock from those two factors largely faded away by the 90s and resulted in a relative decrease in crime.
I think it’s pretty well a given that Rudy got a few extramarital blow jobs.
But it’s only shocking if Clinton did it.
The more you dig in to this guy’s personal history the slimier it gets. He is a truly loathsome bastard.
But what about the Father Knows Best homoeroticism? The codpiece huffing? The genuflecting before the National Kielbassa? The rhetorical tea-bagging?
Tweety nosing Fred Thompson’s baggy old man pants for new man-smells (Old … and I do mean Old Spice!) and pronouncing him The One?
And what of Mitt as the best snap-on hair and shoulders like the front seat of a an old Buick?
Rudy wears drag and can’t even do a good combover! What happened to locking arms against girl and gay cooties and presenting a balls-out united front to let the terrorists know that America’s Reigning Men?
What about all of that?
I’ll give the Republican base a little bit of credit: I think most of their love of authoritarianism is class-based. The fact that economic class coincides heavily with racial demographics is simply a bonus.
I’d say that’s about right on. The so-called founding fathers backed off on the issue of race and slavery at the beginning of this republic. We never got over that obstacle, and it will probably bring us down
Krugman: “In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base…” I don’t know how any Democrat/liberal can say that with a straight face when 90% of blacks vote Democrat. Race is and will continue to be important to either political party as long as our campaign laws allow political parties to use race data in campaign strategy. Think of it as profiling for political purposes. Would anyone here support laws that criminalize race based political campaign strategizing? “Campaign Race Reform” anyone?
I admire Sharpton. I know he’s racially biased, but I loved what he did to Imus and CBS. I just heard Al refer to Edwards in some political conference as a “Southern white male”. It was obvious Sharpton couldn’t bring himself to call Edwards a man. I know how he feels.
BTY, Rudy will not get the nomination. Way too much social and political baggage. He’s the conservative backup plan if the war still isn’t going well next year. Otherwise Thompson or Romney will get it. We don’t need a quasi fascist as president. You think Rudy cut legal corners in NYC to make things happen when he was mayor? Think what he’d do with the power of the White House.
I can’t think of many things more stereotypically fruity than being an actor, which is one reason why conservatives rail against Hollywood to shore up support. But they keep voting for actors. As long as you race-bait and radiate a general asshole vibe, they’ll overlook a lot, which is why the dressing in drag thing won’t matter.
Plus, there’s a long tradition in the frat houses and Bohemian Groves of power of men dressing up as women not to be doing drag but to mock women. I’m sure that his drag act will be rationalized as the more standard woman-hating.
Amadou Diallo. Also Abner Louima and Patrick Dorismond. Louima s*d*mized in an NYPD bathroom with a plunger while the cop hollers “It’s Giuliana Time! Dorismond confronted by a couple of undercover cops asking him for dr*gs. He took offense, the situation escalated, he winds up dead. All three were Haitian immigrants. Diallo is the one immortalized by Springsteen’s song 41 shots.
One positive note: I was living outside Hartford, CT in Y2K and working in Manhattan. I’d take the train down on Mondays and back home on Fridays. Mrs Clinton was basically set to mop the floor with Rudy in the US Senate race before he used his cancer as an excuse to drop out. It is extremely doubtful that Rudy could win any citywide or statewide elections in NY these days.
And the IAFF will also come into play as they document how Rudy screwed things up on their communications equipment and the placement of his
Love nestEmergency Management Center against the recommendations of the professionals.Rudy may well win the nomination–I certainly wouldn’t bet against him right now if his biggest competition is Fred Thompson. But I like our chances as much against him as any of the others.
I’ve long said that Giiuliani’s lack of gay-bashing credentials will happily be overlooked in light of his well-established race-bashing credentials.
I mean hell, the wingers only gay-bash so hard because its a second-best outlet for all the hate they would be putting into race-bashing if it were more socially acceptable.
Interesting column. The Rethuglican Party in the South was spawned by George Wallace in response to Lyndon Johnson’s persuading Congress to pass civil rights, voting rights and open housing legislation. It was nurtured by Richard Nixon, with help from sleazebag political operatives like Lee Atwater, Ralph Reed and Karl Rove. (Wallace and Atwater, to their credit, repented of their hatemongering after becoming ill.)
Giuliani, though? Don’t misunderestimate my Southern brethren’s antipathy toward DamnYankees. (Here it’s still one word.)
While race and class are obviously co-constitutive, let’s not treat race as a mere epiphenomenon of class.
Off-topic, but damn, that ad for “Bullzeye: the men’s portal on the web” is sort of a new direction in your advertising demo, isn’t it?
That said, I think the nail in the coffin for Giuliani is going to be the photos of him in drag. Like or loathe the tactic of showing those off, the man has been taped dressing as a woman _multiple_ times.
I’d argue that the Republican base is a sucker for celebrity and will rationalize justifications around their leader’s politics and personal life unless the shit really hits the fan.
OT, but read this article. It has to be seen to be believed:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article2327863.ece
Don’t forget George W. Bush’s main strength: the ability to say (or accept) the most incredible lies if it furthers the Republican cause.
Face it, Bush wasn’t a big thinker, and didn’t have any ideas, but he had high name recognition and often could be pictured in the dictionary next to “bald faced” (as in: liar). (The smirk wasn’t all that helpful, but there were a lot of people who wanted to smirk along with him, so I suppose that helped, too.)
Were I a strategist (which, thank the good lord, I’m not), I’d suggest folks start formulating the strategy against him, and that the most obvious strategy is his biggest thumping point. He thinks the war in Iraq is just peachy. And everyone else in America already knows that it’s not.
Giuliani has a chance right now, but I still believe his incompetence before and after 9/11 is going to catch up with him. Right now, I am betting on a Thompson/Gingrich ticket. But this really depends on if Thompson can get off his ass and start working for the nomination. Otherwise, I think we are looking at Romney, maybe even a Romney/Thompson ticket.
It is true that the republicans have become the black shirt party, but they still have to be assured that their candidate has some conservative credentials, Giuliani doesn’t.
Rudy’s decision to put NYC’s terrorism response headquarters in the WTC after it already had been attacked the first time will take a lot of explaining to do. He also would have to face constant reminders of how pissed of the 911 responders are at him.
Also, there still are some in the Christian Taliban who will never vote for anyone who is pro-choice, or even someone like Giuliani who pretends to be prochoice.
If the dems weren’t completely in AIPAC’s pocket, Guiliani would be a dream opponent. To win over the GOP base despite his pro-choice, pro-gay rights past, he has to embrace nut-job neocon positions on foreign policy.
Guiliani’s embrace of Norm Poderantz would be enough to sink him if the dems weren’t gutless. Just run ads saying that Guiliani will start another war with Iran.
A vote for Guiliani is a vote for war with Iran. A vote for war with Iran is a vote for $20 per gallon gas.
Repeat the above 2 sentences over and over in ads run in every working class and middle class suburb in America and Guiliani would get crushed.
Richard–Don’t forget about how Hannity constantly used the expression “Lyin’ Louima”–and then he was wrong.
I still see Mitt Romney as getting the nomination. Despite his blandness and his changing positions on abortion and gay marriage, his private sector successes give him the aura of a man who knows how to get things done. With the incompetence we have had under Bush, Romney to some could be refreshing.
As a conservative, I don’t give a shit about Rudy in drag or his three wives or how many blow jobs he got within or between his marriages. All I care about is his policies. His biggest weakness is his stance on illegal immigration. I heard him on his buddy’s show, O’ Reilly, and it’s pretty clear where he stands on it in spite of how he tried to hide it in couched verbiage. He will be called out on this when the time comes.
Ace: When in hell has Hannity ever been right (i.e., correct) about anything?
Richard–very true. I was stating the obvious to emphasize it.
“As a conservative, I don’t give a shit about Rudy in drag or his three wives or how many blow jobs he got within or between his marriages.”
Well, you may be the exception rather than the rule.
Some conservatives thought Ted and Fran Strickland were unfit for Ohio’s gubernatorial mansion because they postponed marriage until their 40s and have never had children, and therefore they were “gays who lived separate lives in Ohio and Kentucky” and “soft on those who sexually assault our children.”
It may be because this is a feminist blog, but the thread keeps drifting away from the point, which has never ceased to be true, that from Nixon on the Republicans have succeeded by shouting (subliminally) “nigger nigger nigger”, even when their rhetoric is no more overt than the slogan of the Tories in ‘05, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”
See Digby’s guest post on why the administration’s slow-as-molasses response to Katrina’s devastation might have been deliberate. New Orleans depopulated of blacks makes Louisiana a red state.
bad Jim–but the right always tries to spin it away by arguing stupid points like “Democrats are racist because Robert Byrd was in the KKK 60 years ago and still talks about ‘white n-word,’” “affirmative action is racist” (of course they seldom complain about legacy admits,) “Jesse Jackson’s and Al Sharpton’s racism against whites is worse than white racism against blacks,” “they’re racist because they oppose Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice,” etc.
Rudy won’t win. Too much baggage. Right now, my money’s on McCain. He’s the “dark horse” that all the smarty-pants types are betting against, which to me just makes him all the more appealing.
Uh, but white kids totally love hip-hop and their parents saw Roots back in the day so white Republican’s can’t be racist, see?
In all seriousness, the love-fest is based on pure white male authoritarianism. For all his (previous) claims about being socially liberal, Rudy does what the public allows him to get away with. As New York’s mayor that was fierce racism thinly disguised as “anti-crime” measures.
As president, he would have a strong base of support, or at least ambivalence, to destroy the basic rights of women and girls, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals and there is nothing in his character that would indicate he is anything but a tyrant who would love to exploit such permission.
McCain’s perfectly happy to pander to the race-baiters as well as to the rest of the pants-wetters.
Romney’s the only one who looks presidential. He’s this election’s Republican Kerry (wait, they had one already: Dewey).
I can’t juggle, but I’m tossing my prospective Californian primary vote from hand to hand. Obama? Edwards? Fear and hope eternally contend, and the face of fear is hope, and the fear of face is the mirror I wake up to.
Of course, African-American loyalty to the Dems can have absolutely nothing to do with the respective policies pushed by the respective parties, can it? Nope, it has to be the product of some kind of marketing/targeting/spin strategy, can’t possibly be the outcomes of rational decision-making based on track record.
I’ll grant you–overall, the differences between Democratic and Republican policy outcomes often needs calipers to measure–reminiscent, from the point of view of out-groups such as people of color, or the poor in general, of Gen. Buck Turgidson’s “unfortunate, but distinguishable outcomes…” But the differences are consistent with the opposed rhetorical stances of the two parties.
If you want to talk about “profiling for political purposes” let’s dredge up the matter of the recent scandal of vote cadgeing in the ‘04 election, with its connections to the firing of the US attorneys in December last year and the appointment of one of the Rove operatives caught red-handed by his own stupid blunder of sending the cadging lists to the wrong e-mail. And how that kind of thing is something the Republican Party is legally enjoined from doing by court order since they got caught at it back in the ’80s. And how Republicans nevertheless systematically indulge in bigoted harassment of non-”white” voters in venues all across the country, every damn election.
Well, as I already alluded to, a Federal court already did in response to egregious examples of Republican racism, back in the ’80s. Good thing y’all “conservatives” are so good at your own to the high standards you espouse, isn’t it.
No, but that’s what we generally get, at least until 2000 when we dropped the “quasi.”
Well, of course we do. He’s a Republican, isn’t he? Then there is the matter of the enumerated examples one can cite.
I’m not sure there are any corners left to cut, except maybe the one he might go around to actually nuke someone. But I think there’s a good chance ol’ aWol will cut that one too before we’re rid of him, and then maybe we’ll never be rid of him, not while we still live anyway.
AJB writes: “The crime boom in the 80s was the result of Reaganomics and crack cocaine. The shock from those two factors largely faded away by the 90s and resulted in a relative decrease in crime.”
Actually, according to Freakonomics the unprecedented and significant national drop in crime was caused the by the legal access to abortion. In other words, the criminals were never born. The authors claimed that children who are most likely to be criminals are those whose parents, especially the mother, don’t truly want and are incapable of providing for, either emotionally or financially.
The book rightly predicted that due to the right-wing rollbacks on abortion rights, starting with Reagan, there would be a stark upswing in violent crime right about…now.
That on top of everything else, huh? Oh boy, just what we needed. Thanks for reminding us.
When Southern Whites voted Democrat were they racist then or only after they started voting Republican? On a related point, the Democrats and the Media had no problem, zero, when the Religious Right voted Democrat from FDR to Jimmy Carter, indeed Carter was praised for his ability to bring out new voters with his “born again” professions.
The Moral Majority only became a problem when they felt betrayed by Jimmah and switch to voting for Reagan and Republicans. Only then did we discover the Threat of the Religious Right.
I think we can see a pattern here and it’s easy to summarize: Vote Democrat = Good.
Vote Republican = Racist, Evil, Authoritarian, Fascist, Classist, Theocratic, etc.
Where am I wrong here?
Perhaps if liberals took violent crime a little more seriously, authoritarian douche bags like Guiliani wouldn’t be able to race bait there way into power. In urban areas like Oakland, Kiladelphia and Newark crime is the top city-level issue, but I haven’t heard any democrat candidates say much about it.
As far as liberal columnists go, Krugman is certainly a lot better than most than the usual democratic party hacks that you’ll get in the mainstream media. In his linked article, which is partly about immigration politics, Krugman concludes that continuation of republican race-baiting (or white identity politics) as a campaign strategy is ultimately doomed because of changing US demographics. I agree.
Black columnists urge attention to violence:
http://www.maynardije.org/columns/dickprince/070817_prince/
In this link there are about 20 more links to black written op-ed pieces from the last 2 weeks pushing for attention to urban violence.
Um, drydock, haven’t you heard of the “Law And Order” candidates? It was a mantra back in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It’s Newspeak for “fascist rat bastards.” We’ve seen many incarnations since then.
Violent crime is a bad thing to be sure, but media hysteria about it bears little correlation to its actual fluctuations, and “Law And Order” methods generally make it worse–which to be sure to fascist rat bastards is a good thing, because then the middle-class sheep stampede into their ideological pens all the more easily. Quite a good racket if you have no conscience, a handicap our so-called “conservatives” learned to amputate or insulate long ago.
The trouble with campaigning against “violent crime” is that it activates our cultivated essentialist political instincts. People think the problem is Other People who are inherently evil and need to be culled from the herd; they don’t look at how our society actually cultivates lawless violence, which frees up the ruling classes to practice more of their own brand of it. It’s just the domestic version of the Bush foreign policy.
And given the built-in racism of our society, it feeds right back into it–thus bringing us directly back to topic and Krugman’s point.
Real solutions would involve seriously restructuring our society as well as our ways of thinking about it–this applies all across the board.
Off-topic, but damn, that ad for “Bullzeye: the men’s portal on the web” is sort of a new direction in your advertising demo, isn’t it?
Look, please, we have a strict separation between ad and editorial here for the protection of editorial integrity. We’re redesigning the website, I promise that a lot of stuff that’s creaky or weird right now will get addressed. August has been on vacation, which put a delay in getting the redesign done.
There are Firefox tricks to block offensive images. I’m not ever going to sign onto a “you can safely assume we endorse our advertiser” policy, since that’s opening the door to editorial manipulation, but the changes in ad layout will make everything look better.
Some conservatives thought Ted and Fran Strickland were unfit for Ohio’s gubernatorial mansion because they postponed marriage until their 40s and have never had children, and therefore they were “gays who lived separate lives in Ohio and Kentucky” and “soft on those who sexually assault our children.”
No, they thought they were unfit because they’re Democrats. The rest is noise. If a Republican couple had that marriage, it would have been no problem.
Of course, African-American loyalty to the Dems can have absolutely nothing to do with the respective policies pushed by the respective parties, can it? Nope, it has to be the product of some kind of marketing/targeting/spin strategy, can’t possibly be the outcomes of rational decision-making based on track record.
The fact that Republicans eliminate the possibility right off the bat that black people make rational voting decisions just makes the entire situation more ironic.
And on a perpetually weird loop.
Actually, according to Freakonomics the unprecedented and significant national drop in crime was caused the by the legal access to abortion. In other words, the criminals were never born.
You make that sound like an entirely separate issue from economics. Increasing poverty=increasing the abortion rate. Where the authors of the book went wrong is assuming that legalization did much to change the abortion rate upwards. It actually holds steady whether it’s legal or not—in fact, countries with legal abortion tend to have lower rates of abortion much of the time, reflecting an overall commitment to women’s health that results in fewer unplanned pregnancies, therefore fewer abortions. The single mother=criminal children thing is oversimplification. Poverty=increased crime. Single mothers are the biggest victims of jacking up the poverty rates.
The abortion rate was probably steady, or only slightly increased, after 1973. But one thing that did skyrocket was the number of single mothers. I spoke with the historian Rickie Solinger about this, and she suggested that Roe signaled to the women of America that they had rights, and a widespread, quiet rebellion against having their babies taken away at birth if they were single resulted.
If more single mothers=more crime, as the Freakanomics authors suggested, we would actually see a post-Roe spike in the 90s, as the kids who were born to the “fuck it, I’ll go it alone” single mother generation’s (which was also puffed up by increased divorce rates) kids came of age. We saw the opposite. I’m forced to conclude, if reproduction is the sole indicator of crime rates, that single motherhood reduces crime.
Don’t dismiss Fred Thompson. He’s so completely worthless and disgusting, such a totally moronic phony, that I can hardly see how a nation chock full of teevee addicts, i.e. shit gourmets, could ever resist him.
New Orleans depopulated of blacks makes Louisiana a red state.
Blacks in New Orleans or no, Louisiana was already a red state before Katrina. The few democrats who are ever elected are generally elected because they’re from old Louisiana political families (and probably due to backroom corruption, old school Southern Democrat style), and they run on extremely conservative platforms. Charlie Melancon, who is one of the Democratic LA reps in Congress, is probably the first Democrat who didn’t have old family credentials to be elected to federal office in decades, and he was elected post-Katrina, partially with the support of disgruntled south Louisianians who weren’t happy with the Republican response to Katrina and Rita. I’m fairly certain that Melancon is a social conservative and ran on a platform far more conservative than any of us here at Pandagon would ever stand for.
On the state level, while there are Democrats in play, they’re never Democrats in the modern American sense, and always Democrats in the old-school Southern sense. Most people vote Democrat because their daddy did, not because they’re liberals trying to elect liberal candidates.
Additionally, Katrina (and Rita) didn’t only affect blacks, and probably didn’t disproportionately affect blacks who are even vaguely politically empowered. We’re not talking about a stable black working/lower-middle class who own homes and cars, and participate openly in politics. We’re talking about the poorest of the poor, people for whom “hand to mouth” is a little optimistic. Not a very large voting bloc. At the level of people who allowed to have a stake in the community, the hurricanes have affected both whites and blacks.
If anything, the failure of Republican administrations to adequately respond to Louisiana hurricanes will eventually be a shot in the foot as disgruntled Republican voters lose loyalty (as has already started happening with the election of Charlie Melancon), not a case of rather extreme gerrymandering.
whoops — just did a little fact checking, and Melancon wasn’t elected after Katrina. He went into office at the beginning of 2005, and Katrina didn’t happen till August.
Well then he’s a true anomaly.
I’d disagree with a bit of the premise - I don’t see a lot of Democrats mystified by Giuliani’s popularity - why his campaign attracts GOP voters in at least a surface sense has always been apparent. The question, which seems to perplex everyone is whether he can see his initial appeal through to winning the whole thing. I remain skeptical in that regard, because I think as New Yorkers found, the more you see of Giuliani, the less the surface appeal matters. At some point, the divorces, the poor relationship with the kids, the 9/11 weaknesses, the police brutality questions… so much else… all of this starts to add up. No one wears his strengths and his flaws as openly as Giuliani, and it’s the flaws that will do him in. I don’t think Dems should lose sight of that.
Mark– The violence happening in urban communities isn’t media hysteria, it’s very real. How the media covers it is open to debate. That said, perhaps some of the “allies” here might want to check the link I put to the black columnists sounding the alarm on the crime issue and not just hand the issue over to right wingers.
Well, looking at your attempted historical accounts, pretty much everywhere. That’s some intellectual dishonesty and historical ignorance ranking up there with Anne Coulter. So much idiocy in one comment. That truly was a work of art, Jabba.
drydock: In case you haven’t noticed there are at least a few comments in this thread alone addressing violence and crime. You just don’t want to hear that violent crime in most areas is a poverty issue. And poverty issues are certainly addressed more by liberal candidates than conservatives.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: given that the “pro-family” crowd is actually the “pro-patriarchy” crowd, they’re not going to be too bothered by Giuliani sticking it to his wife and children, especially since his son was famously hyperactive (in the descriptive, not the diagnostic sense) and it was widely reported in the New York press that Donna Hanover was going to perform in The Vagina Monologues just before they split up. Giuliani=tough daddy (with rebellious wife and kids) is how they’ll be able to rationalize his seemingly anti-family behavior.
It’s also stunning to me every time I realize how many Americans hate New York City (for totally spurious reasons; it’s the safest large city in the country, for pete’s sake!) And Giuliani can credibly run against his own hometown, especially since spineless Democrats tolerate Republican attacks on whole sections of the country where millions of Americans live.
Romney’s the only one who looks presidential. He’s this election’s Republican Kerry (wait, they had one already: Dewey).
Ooops, my goof. That should read:
Romney’s the only one who looks presidential. He’s this election’s Republican Kerry (wait, they had one already: Dewey).
Rudy is unelectable in the general election. A big city mayor, multiple divorces, kids that hate him, pictures of him in drag, pro-choice. But the killer is he is anti-gun. Rudy has an anti-gun record; he’s dead in the water. Especially with their fury at the current Republican mayor of New York whose anti-gun crusade has made Bloomberg public enemy number one for the NRA.
The religious right may buy born again conversion to anti-choice, but the NRA ain’t buying a born again pro gun stance.
The reason he is doing well is that the Democrats are trying to sucker the Republicans into picking Rudy, as the Republicans are trying to sucker the Dems into picking Hillary. It is astonishing how much respect Hillary gets on Fox News.
When the primaries are decided, out come the smears. Problem for the Republicans is that Hillary has been smeared six ways to Sunday, and they haven’t even scratched the surface with Rudy.
There is a reason why Rudy declined to challenge Hillary in his home turf, New York, for senate: He tested the waters, and figured out Hillary would whoop him. She will nationally, too. But so would John Edwards (who the Republicans clearly fear the most), and probably Obama.
I think Romney is the Wink Martindale of this election.