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The right move for Giuliani |
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By Byron York
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Posted: 05/10/07 07:42 PM [ET] |
It appears Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has finally figured out that he needs to perform an immediate flip-flop on the issue of abortion.
Not by becoming pro-life -— he’d be hooted out of the race if he tried that — but by telling GOP audiences, clearly and without any running around, that he is pro-choice and is going to stay that way.
The New York Times reported Thursday that Giuliani “is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days.”
There’s no doubt that’s a risky strategy, given the strength of pro-life voters in the Republican primary electorate. But Giuliani has to do something after twisting himself into a pretzel over abortion for his entire campaign.
While sticking to his core pro-choice position, Giuliani has stressed that he personally hates abortion, that he supports a ban on public funding for abortions, and that, if elected president, he would appoint strict-constructionist judges — a pledge Republican voters could reasonably interpret as a pledge to help overturn Roe v. Wade.
At other times, however, he has suggested that he in fact does support public funding for abortions and that his strict-constructionist judges might be all over the map on the issue.
Giuliani reached a low point last week at the Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in California.
He was asked a simple question: Would the repeal of Roe be a good thing for America?
“It would be OK,” Giuliani answered. Then he added that it would also be “OK” if Roe were upheld.
Whatever.
That was bad enough. But Giuliani made things worse by adding, “I think a judge has to make that decision.”
That was precisely the wrong thing to say to a conservative audience. For them, abortion policy should not be a matter of judicial fiat; it’s a matter for legislatures — elected representatives — to decide. Striking down Roe would not make any abortions illegal, but it would give the people, and not judges, the last word.
Giuliani undoubtedly knows how those conservatives feel. So for him to say that they should all sit tight and see what the judges decide for them — well, he had to know that wouldn’t satisfy anybody.
What Giuliani has needed to do — what became screamingly clear after the debate — is to level with the voters.
He has a very strong record, in some ways the strongest in the GOP field.
He saved New York City at a time when some experts gave up on it and called it ungovernable.
Thousands of New Yorkers weren’t murdered and weren’t robbed, thousands of people got jobs, and virtually everyone enjoyed a better life in the city as a result of Giuliani’s time as mayor.
If the chief qualification for a president of the United States is the ability to grapple with an enormous, sclerotic bureaucracy and make it go in the direction you want, then Giuliani is hugely qualified to be president.
GOP voters also rate him very highly on issues of national security. They see Giuliani’s performance on Sept. 11 as the work of a man who knows what to do in a crisis.
In his campaign, Giuliani is betting that in 2008, those issues will be so important that Republican voters who disagree with him on abortion will overlook that disagreement because he is so strong in other ways.
The Times reports that Giuliani’s polling “has found a relatively small number of voters who would base their vote solely on abortion.”
We’ll see what happens. But it has been clear for some time now that Giuliani’s best strategy would be to declare his position outright.
The other thing he must do, when he discusses his own beliefs, is not to belittle those pro-life voters who disagree with them. Rather, he has to say to them: I am what I am. I am not going to change. But I am also not going to work against you if I am elected president.
There’s no guarantee such a strategy will work. Pollsters say that somewhere between nine and 13 percent of voters are single-issue voters on abortion. Most of them are on the pro-life side.
Giuliani can’t ignore them. Maybe he can’t win them over. But he can level with them — and perhaps win support from others across the political spectrum.
York is a White House correspondent for
National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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