Rudy's unholy jihad

Rudy Giuliani has apparently decided if he can't placate pro-lifers, he will overthrow them.

The New York Times reported May 10 the Republican presidential candidate has decided to embrace his pro-abortion position after muddling it in recent days, trying to take a former-radical-liberal-now-thoughtful-liberal-yet-conservative-friendly stance.

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Poll numbers falling, Giuliani has chucked all that and developed an abortion pride strategy based on "Tsunami Tuesday," the date many liberal states have bumped up their primary to, ahead of primaries of more conservative states. According to the Times:

Mr. Giuliani's campaign ... is eyeing a path to the nomination that would try to de-emphasize the early states in which abortion opponents wield a great deal of influence. Instead, they would focus on the so-called mega-primary of Feb. 5, in which voters in states like California, New York and New Jersey are likely to be more receptive to Mr. Giuliani's social views than voters in Iowa and South Carolina.

Giuliani is gambling he can win the nomination as the sole abortion enthusiast from a field of 10 with a minority of like-minded social liberals.

According to Time magazine, Giuliani has "decided that the reign of social conservatives is coming to an end. 'He understands that there are a lot of Republicans out there who are sick of everyone kowtowing to the single-issue extremists,' said one veteran Republican observer in Washington. 'He's breaking from the pack.'"

(Why does the mainstream media never question whether Democrat voters are getting sick of their party's extremists, like the entire lot of presidential candidates, all of whom support partial-birth abortion?)

The conservative response, via the Times:

[S]aid Phyllis Schlafly, "The Republican Party has been pro-life in its platform ever since 1976, the first platform after Roe, and I think most of the Republicans understand they can't afford to lose the pro-life constituency."

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the conservative magazine, said, "You can't win as a pro-choicer who is going to deliberately set on challenging the party's orthodoxy on the issue."

Rudy disagrees. Signs are he plans to morph the GOP into a Democrat Lite on social issues while remaining firm on fiscal and security issues. He said on Fox News Sunday May 13:

[A]ny candidate of the party has about nine out of 10 things in the platform they agree with and one or two things that they don't agree with. I know what my positions are. A very, very big portion of my party agrees with that. A certain portion of my party disagrees with that. My attempt is to try to broaden the base of the Republican Party, to try to bring in people that can agree on that can disagree on that, because I think the issues that we face about terrorism, about our economy, about the growth of our economy are so important that we have to have the biggest outreach possible.

Rudy's first problem is surmountability. It is not true only a "certain portion" of the GOP disagrees with his support of abortion. It's not even true only a certain portion of Americans disagree.

An underreported CNN poll of May 4-6 found 50 percent of Americans considered themselves pro-life, while only 45 percent said they were "pro-choice." A NYT/CBS poll in March found 41 percent of Republicans thought abortions should be prohibited, and 53 percent of Republicans wanted a presidential nominee who would get tougher on abortion.

The majority of Republicans are pro-life, and they were doing very well drawing center-right Democrats until 9-11 and its aftermath, which should not be misread as causing an ideological shift in the party or country.

Which brings us to Rudy's second problem: sustainability. What would a Republican Party look like without pro-lifers?

Make no mistake; no amount of cajoling will get pro-lifers to vote between two pro-abortion presidential candidates. The Democrat would win, and the trickle-down of missing conservative votes would not bode well for the remaining ticket. The "lesser of two evils" argument doesn't stand when we could have avoided one of those evils. That pretext is getting old anyway.

So Rudy would run a victory lap around a decimated kingdom, the GOP. I live in one of the smaller decimated kingdoms, Illinois. California is another.

Rudy's "big tent" theory has already collapsed. That he wants to trial a failed concept on a grander scale indicates he has core issues problematic to the GOP. It was already apparent this thrice-married man whose kids don't even like him had personal core issues.

But don't all moral relativists operate from a core of selfishness?

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