I’m writing this from the Hyatt Hotel across the street from the California State Capitol here in Sacramento. Tomorrow, America’s Mayor will be visiting this hotel to keynote the California Republican State Convention.
Mayor Giuliani, as we all know, has all but announced his intention to throw his hat in the ring for the 2008 presidential election. If California moves up its primary (which is all but certain at this point), the Mayor could be a huge beneficiary – most polls show him leading the pack. His California organization is being put together by his friend, and former California GOP Gubernatorial nomineee Bill Simon, Jr. We’ll be writing more about Simon’s efforts as we look at the California-specific efforts of all of the major GOP candidates…
It is interesting to note that Mayor Giuliani holds leads in several early primary states where the Republican electorate is comprised of social conservatives (Iowa and South Carolina). It’s surprising because of the Mayor’s positions such as abortion (he has articulated his support in the past for partial-birth abortions), the Second Amendment (he has articulated his support in the past for gun control), and on immigration (he has opposed efforts to crack down on illegal immigrants in the United States, and in New York, specifically).
Along with over a thousand GOPers, I will be intent on the Mayor’s speech tomorrow — one that clearly he and his team have thought about a lot. My question is how the Mayor is going to address these issues, where he is ‘out of touch’ with mainstream GOP activists? One of his opponents, former Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney, who also had articulated some liberal positions in his previous campaigns for office in New England, has articulated a change of heart, and is quite clear that he is not the same Mitt Romney – he’s more conservative.
**There is more – click the link**
February 9th, 2007 at 12:00 am
National Review from this morning:
Many conservatives understandably don’t want to shut the door on Rudy Giuliani. He is very effective at fighting for, and implementing, those conservative causes with which he agrees. Indeed, he represents one of the best examples of executive ability over the last 15 years.
But for four decades, pro-lifers have resisted intense pressure from journalistic, political, and legal elites to declare the abortion question closed. Those elites would surely treat the Republican party’s nomination of a pro-choicer as their final victory. Having blocked that bipartisan ratification of abortion-on-demand for so long, pro-lifers will be especially disinclined to accept it now, after several years in which they have gained ground. (Even Democrats realize that their pro-choice extremism is an electoral loser.)
Many pro-lifers, and many conservatives, may eventually decide that for all his obvious strengths they cannot support Giuliani for president. For now, however, there is a certain symmetry of interest between conservatives and Giuliani. Conservatives should want Giuliani to agree with them on as many issues as possible. And Giuliani should want to win the nomination, without triggering any rush to the party’s exits. We hope he campaigns like it.
http://flapsblog.com/?p=4352
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February 9th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Jon,
Here is the text from the Mayor’s interview on Hannity and Colmes:
HANNITY: How do you feel about the borders? It’s one of our most important security issues. There’s talk about building a fence. Do you support that? Do you support amnesty? Do you support guest worker?
GIULIANI: I support security at the border. I think its enormously important in the post September 11th period. We have to know who is coming into this country. We have to be able to identify them and figure out who they are. I do think that with the fence– the fence honestly has to be a technological fence. The head of my party, the new head, Mel Martinez who is a Senator from Florida, a great guy, he was being interviewed and they asked him about a fence. Do you think a fence should be put up. He said sure. He said except the only people that will pull put it up will be the illegal immigrants. I thought what the point that Mel was making was we need a technological fence. We need to be able to photograph people, see them, know who is there, record them. And then I think there has to be regularization for the people that are here. There’s got to be a program to regularize the people that are here as you establish security at the border. And I would add to many of the proposals– because there are a number of them in the house, senate and president as put forward. I would add to that at the end of the road if somebody’s going to earn citizenship with– citizenship with whatever other hurdles put in the way, at the end of the road they should be able to speak English, read English and have some knowledge of American history. Particularly if you are going to regularize somebody who in an undocumented status.
HANNITY: Does that mean amnesty.
GIULIANI: It means earning it. Here’s the experience. I said I learn add lot from being mayor of New York city. We had a tremendous amount of crime. We did a survey. We figured out there are about 400,000 illegal or undocumented immigrants in New York city. The impact service deported 1500 a year that. Was the most they could deport. So I figured out I had 398,000. Now how do you handle that? What do you do with it? And then what we would catch drug dealers and criminals we’d turn them over to the immigration and naturalization service and say put them at the head of the line. get rid of the drug dealers and criminals first. They were dealing with somebody’s maid and somebody who maybe was teaching at a college and just didn’t have the right papers or somebody who was working in a restaurant and– well that’s all an issue. But the drug dealers and the criminals and now the terrorists are an issue. And if you have a law that isn’t working, and you have thousands and thousands and millions of people, then the terrorists hide among them. We have to have a law that makes sense. and that’s why I think you’ve got to come up with a solution that says much more security at the border, register people, document them, have english at the end of the line, but then have a system to regularize people as well.
http://flapsblog.com/?p=4326
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