This diary started as a comment in Nuisance Industry's diary about the possibility of an ultra-conservative third party that would split the right-wing vote if Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination.
Many here think that Giuliani's a joke, but he's been the Republican frontrunner for some months now, and he is polling surprisingly close to Hillary Clinton (who currently has a slim lead on him, but who was often trailing him slightly in the polls).
I believe that Rudy will be the hardest candidate to defeat in 2008, and that he's going to win a lot more voters than people expect.
Allow me to make my case, below.
I'm going to start on the assumption that everyone here understands a Giuliani presidency would be a disaster. There are many, many articles which point out his terrible record as mayor, cronyism, and lust for power. But this direct quote, I think, best captures the essence of Rudolph W. Giuliani:
What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
[ Interruption by someone in the audience. ]
You have free speech so I can be heard.
Let me now address some of the objections people make against Rudy's candidacy.
No way Rudy's going to get the right-wing Christian vote. He's got three wives, and didn't he dress in drag once?
The conventional wisdom is that Rudy won't play well with the fundamentalist Christians who are so important to the GOP base. But according to a recent Gallup poll, Rudy's actually the Republican frontrunner among religious Southern conservatives. His personal life and social positions seem not to be hurting him at all.
Rudy may not share the fundamentalists' beliefs and agenda, but he sure as hell won't stand in their way. As long as he promises to appoint "strict constructionist" judges, they'll be happy.
Dobson and his ilk are crazy, but not stupid. If the fundamentalist leaders realize that moderates and independents are getting sick of the folksy populist types like Bush and Thompson, they just may turn to a "socially liberal" former mayor of NY as a more electable face. The fundie followers will do what they're told, once Dobson and Robertson make up their minds. To those who doubt this, I suggest Bob Altemeyer's excellent book on authoritarian behavior. Dr. Altemeyer is a psychologist who's studied authoritarian personalities, both the followers and the leaders.
To the fundies, Rudy speaks a deeper language than religion: the language of force. They sense that he is the one GOP candidate who is offering what they truly want: a powerful daddy figure who'll fuck up blacks, gays, Hispanics, Muslims, and anyone else who steps out of line.
And frankly, there are a lot of so-called moderates who think that's a good idea. I was at a forum where the topic of immigration came up, and several women (ostensibly Democrats) said very ugly things about how Mexican immigrants were taking good American jobs and how we should deport them all.
Those women might call themselves Democrats in public. But in the privacy of the voting booth, I suspect they'd be sorely tempted to go for Rudy. Especially since he has the moderate, urban veneer to make him respectable in their minds.
How many people are there across this country who feel the same way?
There's so much dirt on him. Surely it's going to come out and sink him.
It would, if the media would call him on it. But they haven't, and they probably won't.
The NY Firefighters' union came out against him. They hate him for leaving the 9/11 cleanup workers to work in toxic air. What was the response? Why, to suggest that Rudy was being Swift-Boated by the Democrats.
Rudy lied about how much time he spent at the 9/11 cleanup, making the unbelievable claim that he spent more time there than the cleanup workers. This elicited not a peep from the media.
Everyone said in 2000 that there was no way an ex-alcoholic with a record of military absenteeism and highly questionable business deals could get by all the media scrutiny. They were wrong.
But what about the war? Everyone hates the war. Isn't Rudy the only Repub who's pushing for us to stay in Iraq?
True. Right now he's saying we shouldn't pull out of Iraq.
But after he gets the nomination? Expect him to change his tune. He'll say we need to pull out--after we win the war on terror. Not being in Congress, he doesn't have to vote on Iraq, and so can do a 180 without being called on it.
He'll make seductive promises about peace with honor and about how we can't afford anything less than victory in Iraq. He'll say that with a more effective military policy than Bush's, we can end the war quickly and cheaply. Americans may hate the war, but they also hate to admit defeat. Rudy might offer them a way out of this dilemma.
He'll sing siren songs, and his opponent, being reality-based, will repeat that she can't guarantee we'll be completely out of Iraq even five, six years down the road. But what she won't do is call out Rudy's B.S. and forcefully repudiate the Bush dream of global military domination, and so she'll only sound like a pale echo of Rudy when it comes to Iraq.
Who's really paying the price for this war in America? It's poor, white rural townsfolk. The armed forces are more segregated by socioeconomic class than ever. More than Vietnam, this is the poor man's war.
Middle-class Americans may say they're against the war. But deep down, many of them won't go very far out of their way to oppose it, as long as it isn't their kids doing the dying. If Rudy offers the tantalizing chance for a speedy and cheap "victory" in Iraq, they may listen to him. Especially if he promises to keep them safe and rich.
OK, Rudy might have a shot. What makes him worse than any of the other Republicans?
To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them that they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them.
--Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
Giuliani has a much broader voter base than might appear at first sight, because he appeals directly to the worst instincts of our nature. His candidacy will splinter the moderate vote by exploiting the seething racism, classism, and xenophobia that lie buried deep below the surface of much of "progressive" middle-class America. At the same time it will play to their complacency and sense of entitlement--the little voice inside people's heads that says that at the end of the day, if they have their great house, nice car, and big-screen TV, maybe a bunch of poor kids and dark-skinned people dying in a faraway war isn't really such a big deal.
And those sentiments aren't limited to the middle class; they're shared by many of the poor too, urban and rural alike, who are even angrier at being screwed over. If you aren't happy with your lot in life, the first instinct is to look for someone to blame. Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, the homeless--Rudy's got an endless list of scapegoats for you to vent on.
Unlike the other Republican candidates, Rudy's only political experience is as mayor of a large city. He has little understanding of the world at large, preferring an approach of brute force and preemption in his foreign policy. He is short-tempered and prone to lashing out at his enemies with whatever means are at hand.
More than Romney, Thompson, or McCain, Giuliani is the true heir to Bush's legacy. He'll legitimize the anti-intellectualism, hyper-nationalism, and mindless cruelty which are the hallmarks of the modern GOP, pushing a politics based solely on hatred and military aggression. His presidency would plant the seed from which a true American fascist movement would spring, should we enter a prolonged economic depression.
We ignore Giuliani at our peril, and the world's.