Rudy Giuliani: Lifelong Liberal

By: George J. Marlin
April 16, 2007 06:33 PM EST

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has been barnstorming the nation, claiming the Ronald Reagan mantle. Recent opinion polls suggest his campaign is striking a chord with the GOP's rank and file but indicate most Republicans don't really know where Mr. Giuliani stands on key issues.

Those who do know are glossing over some very striking philosophical flaws -- at least from a truly conservative perspective. Rudy not only supports abortion but also has advocated for partial-birth abortion and government funding of abortion. He favors gun control, gay rights, domestic partnerships and bias-crime laws. And that's just a short list.

As a conservative activist who has observed Giuliani for many years (and who ran against him in the 1993 mayoral election), I can say categorically that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a conservative. In my judgment, his record leaves no doubt that he's a lifelong liberal.

In college, Rudy attacked senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, as an "incompetent, confused and sometimes idiotic man," and he urged Republicans to "find men who will adequately address themselves to the problems of discrimination, of poverty, of education, of public housing and the many more problems that Sen. Goldwater and company throw aside in the name of small laissez-faire government."

Former New York governor Mario Cuomo, a liberal icon, put it this way: "(Giuliani's) basically very pragmatic. And he's progressive. He is not a Neanderthal, a primitive conservative. But look, he's a clever human being. He can shave and draw fine distinctions when he needs to."

Giuliani's first wife, Regina, agreed. She told Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett that when she and Rudy separated in 1980, she "still considered him to be a liberal Democrat." She also observed that "(Rudy) generally won't do things unless he believes them, ... but he's not a saint, and he will do things that serve his interests."

Rudy first switched from Democrat to Independent, and then to Republican, not because he embraced the tenets of conservatism but in order to move up the U.S. Justice Department ladder.

"He only became a Republican after he began to get all these (Justice Department) jobs," Rudy's mother, Helen Giuliani, told Barrett. "He's definitely not a conservative Republican. He thinks he is, but he isn't. He still feels very sorry for the poor."

As a candidate for mayor of New York, Giuliani distanced himself from Ronald Reagan and the GOP. During his first mayoral bid, in 1989, The New York Times pointed out that he "noted frequently that he was supported by the liberal wing of the Republican Party and maintained that he never embraced Mr. Reagan's broad conservative agenda." And when conservatives attacked him during that 1993 mayoral campaign, Giuliani said, "Their fear of me is that I'm going to be a beachhead for the establishment of a more progressive form of Republicanism."

On another occasion he told a television host, "I do not look to see what the catechism of conservatism says about how to solve a problem."

And we mustn't forget that when Giuliani endorsed governor Cuomo for reelection to a fourth term in 1994, he did so, he said, because Republican George Pataki had "a very right-wing voting record" and because Pataki proposed an "irresponsible" 25 percent state income tax cut.

Giuliani also seriously considered endorsing Bill Clinton in 1996 and instead backed Republican nominee Bob Dole with very little fanfare.

"Most of Clinton's policies," he said at the time, "are very similar to mine."

Some Republicans and conservatives are now claiming that Rudy has changed and really become more conservative, and they cite as an example his abandonment of his former vehement opposition to school vouchers. But when Rudy Crew, former New York City Public Schools chancellor, asked Giuliani about this policy shift, the mayor said, "Don't worry about it. It's just a political thing, a campaign thing. I'm not going to do anything. Don't take it seriously." This particular rightward shift was simply a ploy to enhance Giuliani's 2000 U.S. Senate candidacy.

Contrary to what we've been hearing and reading, Rudy Giuliani is today what he has always been: a liberal. Conservatives should take stories of his Damascus Road-like conversion with a grain of salt. Rudy, like Hillary, is campaigning for the presidency in order to implement lifelong leftist beliefs.

George J. Marlin's latest book is "Squandered Opportunities: New York's Pataki Years" (St. Augustine's Press, 2006). In 1993, he was the Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York City.

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