By Brendan Loy
Among some of my liberal friends (and some commenters on this blog), it has long been an article of faith that Rudy Giuliani cannot win the Republican nomination because he's too socially liberal and has too shady of a personal life. According to them, those closed-minded Republican religious wackos would never vote for a pro-choice, pro-gay, twice-divorced candidate who once dressed in drag -- never, under any circumstances, regardless of his strength (or perceived strength) on other issues like terrorism and national security.
I happen to think the Republican base is a little bit less monolithic and one-dimensional than that, so I have repeatedly argued against this viewpoint for the last several years. (I think it's come up a few times on the blog, and I can also remember several conversations along these lines in the law school lounge.) I don't deny that Giuliani's socially liberal stances are a liability with your average GOP voter, but I've never believed they are the overwhelming, insurmountable liability that left-wing oversimplification of the conservative psyche would suggest.
Now, with the primaries fast approaching and Giuliani continuing to look like the front-runner, Ann Althouse says the oversimplifiers, like New York Times columnist Frank Rich, are finally having second thoughts:
Why is Rudy doing so well? People in the know used to think the rubes
just didn't realize Rudy has dressed in drag and once lived with 2 gay
guys; they just remembered him as the star of that 9/11 show they saw
on TV that one time.
But now it's dawning on the pundits that
Americans probably know all that stuff by now, so why isn't Rudy sunk?
They're shuffling around for explanations. You could say "terrorism
fears trump everything," or "the rest of the field is weak." But Rich thinks the right answer is that Americans really aren't as
narrow-minded as they are portrayed...
I agree, except that it isn't Americans who have been portrayed as narrow-minded, it's Republicans. Let's be clear about that.
Anyway, Rich focuses on the extent to which "self-promoting values hacks" like James Dobson and Gary Bauer have puffed up their own importance, and that's certainly true. But in an odd way, the far left has collaborated with the far right to create the "rarely questioned conventional wisdom...that
no Republican can...win the presidency
without pandering...to the most
bullying and gay-baiting power brokers of the religious right." For Dobson, Bauer, et. al., the benefits of this CW are obvious: it makes them seem more important than they are. For the oversimplifiers on the left, the motivation is quite different: painting all Republicans as Dobson clones is a lovely straw-man argument, lending itself nicely to the all-too-common lefty conceit that liberals are the only tolerant, decent, rational people in this country. (Many conservatives, to be fair, do the same thing to liberals, painting them with a broad brush based on the words and actions of a zealous few. In fact, I must admit that I may have been guilty of doing this on, er, one or two occasions. But I think it's more widespread on the left, though I admit that's a subjective perception that can be neither proven nor disproven.)
Anyway, Rich points out something that some of us who don't spend our time hanging out in the New York Times newsroom noticed a while ago: that Dobson & co. "don't speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many
evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have
in fact had no clothes for some time." (Now there's an unpleasant mental image... shudder.)
Rich concludes that "should Rudy Giuliani end up doing
a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their
graves." Yes. But it will also be on the graves of the armchair pundits on the left who have long insisted that Republicans are too one-dimensional and closed-minded to even seriously consider nominating someone like Giuliani.
(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)
P.S. On a related note, I'm feeling pretty good at the moment about my two-year-old dinner bet on the GOP presidential race.
P.P.S. Here's more from Rich on the disconnect between evangelicals and their alleged "leaders":
But the most significant — and happiest — explanation for the values czars' demise as a political force is that white evangelical Christians and a new generation of evangelical leaders have themselves steadily tacked a different course from the Dobson crowd. A CBS News poll this month parallels what the Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick found in his examination of evangelicals for today's Times Magazine. Like most other Americans, they are more interested in hearing from presidential candidates about the war in Iraq and health care than about any other issues.
Abortion and same-sex marriage landed at the bottom of that list; fighting poverty outpolled abortion as a personal priority by a 3-to-2 margin. To see just how large a gap separates that evangelical electorate from the values organizations that purport to speak in its name, just look at the Values Voter Summit that the Family Research Council convened to much press attention in Washington last weekend. In a survey of participants to determine which issue would be "most important" in choosing a presidential candidate, the summit's organizers didn't even think to list the war, health care or fighting poverty among the 12 hot-button options.
The Values Voter Summit's survey of the attendees' presidential preferences showed just as large a disconnect. Rudy Giuliani came in next to last (behind Tom Tancredo, ahead of John McCain) in the field of nine candidates, earning only 1.85 percent of the vote. By contrast, among white evangelicals nationwide in the CBS News poll, he was in a statistical dead heat for first place with Fred Thompson; indeed, Mr. Giuliani's 26 percent among evangelicals nearly matches his showing among all Republican voters. The discrepancy between the CBS poll and the summit survey leaves you wondering who exactly follows Dr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins beyond the ticket buyers who showed up for their media circus last weekend at the Washington Hilton.
Indeed.
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