The American Conservative

The dean of Washington Post political columnists says that reports of the GOP’s impending demise are premature. Maybe so. The evidence Broder gives, though, suggests just the opposite:

Support for President Bush and his policies remains high among Republicans. His overall job rating among GOP voters is 75 percent, “and by overwhelming numbers they approve of his handling of foreign policy, the war in Iraq and the management of the economy.”

That does not suggest a party wracked by anxiety or guilt…

Is it really a sign of health for Republicans that they still think everything is fine with the Bush administration and the Iraq War? Expressing such firm confidence in the leading lemming as he’s taking the herd over the cliff is maybe not a good thing.

Steve Chapman on Giuliani and his fans:

What the enchantment with Rudy suggests is that the GOP has morphed from a party that reveres limited government to a party that is girlishly infatuated with executive authority.

In 1964, presidential nominee Barry Goldwater declared it “the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power.” George W. Bush, by contrast, has done everything possible to create a concentration of power in the White House, while circumventing the checks traditionally provided by Congress and the courts.

Giuliani would not be one to reverse that development. His instincts bring to mind another New York Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who thought the presidency “should be a very powerful office” and that “the president should be a very strong man who uses without hesitation every power the position yields.” He’s the sort of guy to put the bully in “bully pulpit.”

… In office, he frequently pressed against the limits of his authority, and then kept going. One instance was his attempt to evict the Brooklyn Museum of Art because he objected to one painting in a temporary exhibit–an action that a federal court ruled unconstitutional. He sued New York magazine for daring to make a joke about him in its ads.

Legendary lawyer Floyd Abrams noted in his book, “Speaking Freely,” that “over 35 separate successful lawsuits were brought against the city under Giuliani’s stewardship arising out of his insistence on doing the one thing that the 1st Amendment most clearly forbids: using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of government itself.”

(Hat tip to Gene Healy, who adds, “The man who pioneered creative RICO prosecutions and perp-walks for white-collar crime doesn’t have a libertarian bone in his body.”)

My review of Brian Doherty’s comprehensive history of modern libertarianism, Radicals for Capitalism, is now on-line here.

I’m a little surprised at how much coverage the assassination of Captain America is getting. He’s not the best-known comic-book character, and Marvel Comics is renowned for its revolving door of death. I remember around 1987 when they nuked the Hulk — that was pretty impressive to a nine-year-old Daniel McCarthy. They couldn’t possibly bring him back from that: he got nuked, there was nothing left but his shadow burned into the ground. (As it turned out, he was actually teleported away to another dimension at the last minute — lucky, that.) Still, I guess offing Cap in these dying days of the Bush administration does strike a chord with the national mood, or at least mood of the national press.

Among other things, because he’s so power-hungry he might just be the last president we ever have, warns Jim Sleeper:

The first serious problem is structural and political: A man who fought the inherent limits of his mayoral office as fanatically as Giuliani would construe presidential prerogatives so broadly he’d make George Bush’s notions of “unitary” executive power seem soft.

Even in the 1980s, as an assistant attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department and U.S. Attorney in New York, Giuliani was imperious and overreaching. He “perp-walked” Wall Streeters right out of their offices in dramatic prosecutions that failed. He made the troubled daughter of a state judge, Hortense Gabel, testify against her mother and former Miss America Bess Meyerson in a failed prosecution charging, among other things, that Meyerson had hired the judge’s daughter to bribe her into helping “expedite” a messy divorce case. The jury was so put off by Giuliani’s tactics that it acquitted all concerned, as the Washington Post recalled ten years later in assessing Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s subpoena of Monica Lewinsky’s mother to testify against her daughter.

Sleeper continues:

Giuliani’s 9/11 performance was sublime for the unnerving reason that he’d been rehearsing for it all his adult life and remained trapped in that stage role. When his oldest friend and deputy mayor Peter Powers told me in 1994 that 16-year-old Rudy had started an opera club at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, I didn’t have to connect too many of the dots I’d been seeing to begin noticing that Giuliani at times acted like an opera fanatic who’s living in a libretto as much as in the real world.

… Giuliani called the Metropolitan Opera only a few days after 9/11 and insisted its performances resume. At the first of these, the orchestra, striking up a few well-known chords, brought the entire cast, Met administrative, secretarial, and custodial staff (who’d come up onstage), and the capacity audience to their feet to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with unprecedented passion. A few days later Giuliani proposed that his term be extended on an “emergency” basis beyond its lawful end on January 1, 2002. (It wasn’t, and the city did as well as it could have, anyway.)

Meanwhile, John McCain wants to be Darth Vader.

The New York Times‘ David Kirkpatrick reports on Mitt Romney’s donations to conservative organizations, many of which have been notably friendly toward him lately. But of course, those donations didn’t buy any influence. Rich Lowry even points to a timely pro-McCain cover story in National Review to illustrate the point.

Kirkpatrick writes:

The recipients of Mr. Romney’s donations said the money had no influence on them. But some of the groups, notably Citizens for Life and the Family Institute, have turned supportive of Mr. Romney after criticizing him in the past.

Coming on the eve of his presidential campaign, Mr. Romney’s contributions could create the appearance of a conflict of interest for groups often asked to evaluate him. All the groups said he had never contributed before, and his foundation’s public tax filings show no previous gifts to similar groups. Its 2006 contributions will become public with its tax filings later this year.

Justin Raimondo compares Rich Lowry’s view of perjury during the Clinton era to his take on Scooter Libby’s perjury today. Is perjury not a crime if there are no charges arising from what the perjuror lied abot? Lowry didn’t think so back then.

Contrary to some libertarians, I think Libby would have earned himself slammer time even in libertopia. Think of it this way: if a company contractually guranteed anonymity to its employees and an employee of the company perjures himself in the course of covering up a possible violation of the anonymity contract, shouldn’t he be subject to a stiff penalty? Depending on the contract and the case law that might well include jail time. It should be underscored, too, that swearing under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is about as a strong a contractual obligation as anyone can enter into.

The pro-life and antiwar Democratic Senator who was George McGovern’s running mate until word of his psychiatric treatment — including electroconvulsive therapy — died Sunday at age 77. We could use a few Democrats (or heck, Republicans for that matter) more like him. He once co-wrote a book called War and Presdiential Power: A Chronicle of Congressional Surrender. He didn’t put up with any crap from neocons during the Iran-Contra hearings, either, as this exchange reproduced in John Patrick Diggins’s new biography of Ronald Reagan reminds us:

Eagleton: Today I asked were you at any time in the fundraising business.

[Elliott] Abrams: We made our solicitation to a foreign government.

Eagleton: Were you then in the fundraising business?

Abrams: I would say we were in teh fundraising business. I take your point.

Eagleton: Take my point? Under oath, my friend, that’s perjury. [Abrams had earlier denied raising funds in the Middle East to support the Contras.] Had you been under oath, that’ s perjury.

Abrams: Well, I don’t agree with that, Senator.

Eagleton: That’s slammer time.

Abrams: You heard my testimony, Senator.

Eagleton: I heard it, and I want to puke.

…think that the United States of America circa 2008 is likely to resemble New York City circa 1988? Evidently he does; he writes of Rudy Giluliani:

his deviations from the social conservatives’ agenda is more than balanced by his record as mayor of New York. That city was liberalism’s laboratory as it went from the glittering metropolis celebrated in the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) to the dystopia of the novel “Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987). Giuliani successfully challenged the culture of complaint that produced the politics of victimhood that resulted in government by grievance groups.

Will is describing there how Giuliani sees himself, but plainly enough Will buys into it. But what “culture of complaint” in the America of 2008 is Giuliani going to challenge? There’s something wrong with thinking that measures that were appropriate in New York City nearly twenty years ago are what the United States as a whole needs today. It’s as nutty as saying that Iraq resembles postwar Germany. Is Ruday gonna save the country from the legions of menacing squeegee men rampant in Peoria and Albuquerque?

I forget where I was reading it or who was telling it to me, but it was lately brought to my attention that George W. Bush polled quite well in surprising places like Massachusetts early in the 2000 election cycle. Once the campaign really got going, of course, most states reverted to their expected loyalties, and the election turned into a squeaker.

This came up in the context of Giuliani’s numbers in blue states now. They’re great, ahead of Hillary Clinton or Obama. But by November 2008, what are the odds that most liberals and blue-state independents are still going to want to vote Republican — especially if the Iraq War continues to fester? By then, of course, we’ll be refamiliarized with names like Bernie Kerik and Abner Louima. What exactly is Giuliani going to campaign on, anyway? That he’ll kill more foreigners and jail more Americans than Hillary Clinton will? I don’t think he’ll sell in the blue states — and by that point he might not sell in the red states, either.

Nominating Romney, meanwhile, amounts to putting a poodle in a kiddie pool with a crocodile. Hillary will eat him whole. Of the three top Republican contenders, it’s McCain who actually stands the best chance. But that’s not saying much — I certainly wouldn’t put any money on him.

All this is just idle chatter, of course. The events of the next year will shake up the contenders quite a bit.  The one good thing about this extended presidential season is that all the leading contenders can only lose popularity as the thing drags out, allowing all the more time for gaffes, mudslinging, and the intercession of force majeure. Giuliani, as the most publicity-fueled candidate, stands to lose the most, especially once red-state Republicans hear where he actually stands on issues like abortion and guns. But I wouldn’t count on that to derail his march to the nomination, with so many primaries front-loaded, including California, which has now adopted a district-by-disctrict allocation scheme for awarding delegates in the primary. Even if Giuliani lost the state of California as a whole, he could pick up enough delegates from liberal areas to put him well on the way to locking down the nomination.