Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

City Journal's Steve Malanga says Rudy Giuliani is a conservative and - more importantly - an electable conservative. Says Malanga: "In a GOP presidential field in which cultural and religious conservatives may find something to object to in every candidate who could really get nominated (and, more important, elected), Giuliani may be the most conservative candidate on a wide range of issues. Far from being a liberal, he ran New York with a conservative’s priorities..."

Not since Teddy Roosevelt took on Tammany Hall a century ago has a New York politician closely linked to urban reform looked like presidential timber. But today ex–New York mayor Rudy Giuliani sits at or near the top of virtually every poll of potential 2008 presidential candidates. Already, Giuliani’s popularity has set off a “stop Rudy” movement among cultural conservatives, who object to his three marriages and his support for abortion rights, gay unions, and curbs on gun ownership. Some social conservatives even dismiss his achievement in reviving New York before 9/11. An August story on the website Right Wing News, for instance, claims that Giuliani governed Gotham from “left of center.” Similarly, conservatives have been feeding the press a misleading collection of quotations by and about Giuliani, on tax policy and school choice issues, assembled to make him look like a liberal.

But in a GOP presidential field in which cultural and religious conservatives may find something to object to in every candidate who could really get nominated (and, more important, elected), Giuliani may be the most conservative candidate on a wide range of issues. Far from being a liberal, he ran New York with a conservative’s priorities: government exists above all to keep people safe in their homes and in the streets, he said, not to redistribute income, run a welfare state, or perform social engineering. The private economy, not government, creates opportunity, he argued; government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector’s way. He denied that cities and their citizens were victims of vast forces outside their control, and he urged New Yorkers to take personal responsibility for their lives. “Over the last century, millions of people from all over the world have come to New York City,” Giuliani once observed. “They didn’t come here to be taken care of and to be dependent on city government. They came here for the freedom to take care of themselves.” It was that spirit of opportunity and can-do-ism that Giuliani tried to re-instill in New York and that he himself exemplified not only in the hours and weeks after 9/11 but in his heroic and successful effort to bring a dying city back to life.

The entrenched political culture that Giuliani faced when he became mayor was the pure embodiment of American liberalism, stretching back to the New Deal...

It's a very persuasive article. Still, Giuliani's support for gay unions, abortion rights and limits on gun ownership will weaken his support among social conservatives adn gun owners. To the extent that Giuliani can make the primary election race about other issues - crime, education, national security, tax cuts and the economy come to mind - he can minimize his weakness, a task made easier by the less-than-sterling conservative credentials on social issues of his two main rivals for the nomination - Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Giuliani, Malanga reminds us, "rode to victory in 1993 with heavy support from the same white ethnic Democratic voters who, nearly a decade earlier, had crossed party lines even in liberal New York to vote for Ronald Reagan." And then Giuliani governed New York City just as his promised - based on bedrock conservative principles, just like Reagan.

You can - and should - read the whole City Journal article, online here.