Ed Morrisey looks at Steve Malanga’s piece on Rudy Giuliani’s pragmatic conservatism and adds his own observations:
I’ve often thought that conservatives have been too quick to dismiss Giuliani. Among the front-runners for the GOP nomination, he has the most consistent public record of accomplishment. He fought the Mob and won, crippling their once-unlimited power in the Big Apple, at no small personal risk to himself and his family. Giuliani also took on the task of running NYC when it appeared hopelessly lost to decay and a generation of liberal policies that had allowed the streets to fall under the sway of gangsters petty and grand. He also proved that welfare-to-work policies could succeed before Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress bolstered his efforts at the federal level…
That isn’t to say that his positions aren’t problematic. He has been consistently pro-choice, and like many prosecutors, supports gun-control legislation. Those positions rightly make conservatives worry about what a President Giuliani would do once in office. However, he has also consistently spoken against judicial activism, and as a former federal prosecutor, knows first-hand the damage it does. Giuliani has promised to appoint judicial constructionists to the federal bench, the kind not likely to impose abortion or gun policy from their unchecked positions.Read the rest of Ed’s post and read Malanga’s excellent piece on Giuliani’s effectiveness in leading a revival of New York City.
Update: Just a note for those who are not familiar with Malanga’s work, he wrote a brilliant book on the way the left is working behind the scenes to change public policy called The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today. I read the book when it was released a couple of years ago and highly recommend it.
For more on Giuliani…I have written a bit on the prospect of a Giuliani presidency here and here.
Update II: Rudy did pretty well on this list.
