Rudy Guiliani received a very warm welcome today from the delegates at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. , as he recounted his record of reducing crime and taxes while Mayor of New York City, and his support for the war on terrorism. And there was a Californian in Rudy’s entourage — Bill Simon, who joined Rudy in the walk to the podium of the CPAC speech.
Mitt Romney is scheduled to speak this afternoon at 2:45 pm Eastern Time, and that speech will be covered by C-SPAN. Romney is holding a special reception later in the day, at 5:45 pm, and he snagged popular Conservative leader Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform to speak at that event.
I had a chance to talk to Guiliani for awhile in the Green Room before his speech. I asked Rudy about his record on taxes. He told me he was successful in cutting 23 taxes while Mayor of New York City and tried to get more taxes cut, but wasn’t able to get all the cuts he wanted from a Democrat City Council. Nevertheless, of the taxes he did cut, one of the leading ones was the hotel tax, which he used as a model to cut other taxes. He slashed that tax by more than half, and saw tax revenue then actually rise by $100 million as tourists stopped avoiding NYC because of the high taxes. He pointed out that cutting taxes often has the effect of actually generating more tax revenue, not less, and that this was his philosophy. He also said he completely knocked out an "unincorporated business" tax that allowed NYC to tax just about anything the city cared to tax.
John Gizzi of Human Events shared with me in the Green Room his observation that Rudy’s speech at the California Republican Party really marked a beginning of conservative acceptance of Guiliani’s message.
Dave Keene, the Chairman of the American Conservative Union, and I mentioned John McCain’s failure to come speak to CPAC, and three other conservative conferences in the last few months, and Rudy had an interesting comment "I don’t see what the problem is in talking to people."
Other Californians spotted at the conference include Lew Uhler of the National Tax Limitation Committee, Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation, and Carl Olson, of State Department Watch.
[Publisher’s Note: Jim Lacy has endorsed Rudy Giuliani in the GOP Primary, which doesn’t take away from his observations, but is important to note – Flash]