Giuliani Track Record is Alright With Conservatives

Recently Dick Morris wondered aloud, “When did the Christian Right’s agenda come to include litmus tests on immigration, guns and race/gender preferences?”

I don’t know, but I like it a LOT, probably because I agree with their positions on all three – enforcement first, respect of the Second Amendment and no to preferences.

Of course, many pundits feel that two of the currently leading prospective GOP candidates for 2008, McCain and Giuliani, will beach themselves on the shoals of those issues.

In a January 11th piece (“ “Liberal” Rudy? Not on Qutas”), Deroy Murdock makes a much overlooked point about Rudy Giuliani – not only is Rudy excellent on the issue of crime control and he gets the fact that international terrorism is beyond the scope of American law enforcement, he also gets it right on race/gender-based preferences and welfare reform and in so doing, makes the case that Giuliani may navigate those issues far more effectively than can McCain.

Murdock notes that, “In his first month, Mayor Giuliani scrapped New York’s 20 percent set-asides for minority- and female-owned contractors, and a 10 percent price premium that City Hall let such companies charge above the bids of white, male competitors.” Giuliani saw the policy as not only discriminatory, but fiscally unsound costing New York City millions of dollars each year, at a time when the city was running a $3 BILLION deficit!

Giuliani replaced those set-asides (quotas) with contractor workshops on how to prepare more competitive applications, while a number of projects were divided up into smaller units, so that newer, less-capitalized bidders could qualify.Giuliani also quickly shuttered the city’s offices of African-American/Caribbean Affairs, Asian Affairs, European-American Affairs, Gay Community Affairs, Jewish Community Affairs, and Latino Affairs, as he saw these as fiefdoms that sought favor, not fairness.

Giuliani appointed Herman Badillo as Chancellor of the City University of New York and together they ended the “open admissions” that had plagued CUNY for over two decades. By increasing graduation requirements and other academic standards, they generated reams of gloom and doom predictions, but in fact, CUNY’s minority enrollment and graduation rates actually grew after Giuliani and Badillo raised standards across the board for all students.

The welfare reform enacted in New York City by the Giuliani administration immediately cut the city’s welfare rolls by over a third! Proving what many social Conservatives had suspected for decades, that much of the city’s inordinate welfare expenditures were due to things like “double-dipping,” (collecting welfare from different Municipalities) and outright fraud.

And as Murdock notes that Rudy Giuliani,

“did not manage all this in lily-white Provo, Utah or right-wing Colorado Springs. Rudolph W. Giuliani courageously accomplished these things in a largely minority city notorious for its liberalism. That’s leadership.”

Not only is it leadership, but it’s a common sense course and a proven record that should resonate with Conservatives.

It’s also something that could put Rudy Giuliani in a much better position than John McCain.