We’ve made no secret over our sadness watching the Giuliani campaign. As long time readers know, in an earlier incarnation the Stiftung worked directly for him. Our interaction with the man confirmed his basic social tolerance and inherent decency. One way to measure a public persona is how they treat the most junior members of society or staff when no one is watching, there are no cameras and no possibility of public benefit. His bout with cancer and attending the funerals of 9/11 we are confident only enhanced this trait.
We also credit him (and Ed Rendell in Philadephia) for largely turning those metropolitan areas around. Both proved again that large cities are governable. Contemporary thinking wrote them off. Did he make mistakes? Undoubtedly. Is Bloomberg even better? He’s building on a stable legacy — who’s to say what and how he would have done if he inherited a Dinkins handoff.
Re 2008, tactical political reasons — as you know — forced Giuliani’s lurch to the extreme Right on foreign policy. The political logic is inescapable. It also all but extinguishes prospect of supporting him personally. (We have not approached the campaign in any way and have no contact with them).
You, Dear Reader, already know that he’s surrounded himself with the likes of Wedgewood, Frum, Rubin, Norman Podhoretz, Stephen Rosen and Martin Kramer. The campaign also signed up Hoover Institute’s Peter Berkowitz,who also runs the George Mason University Law School’s Israel Program on Constitutional Government.
Now Team Rudy recognizes they’ve over done it. Via Eli Lake at The Sun comes a disingenuous and stunningly cynical article. Team Rudy now claims that everyone should ignore the Neocons and Straussians behind the curtain. Instead, they hope to offer us the refurbished and allegedly centrist Charles Hill. Like the New Nixon, Hill purports to be a moderate and cashes in on his brief association with George Schultz. Hill, oddly and perversely, even brags as a token of diversity that the campaign has hired “Robert Conquest, who has worked as both an adviser to Margaret Thatcher and a mentor of Christopher Hitchens”.