The new Republican

George Will thinks Rudy Giuliani (or at least the political winds he represents) is the future of the Republican party. I actually tend to agree. It seems to me that Republicans have two options. They can continue their base-mobilizing strategy or they can run the party--Democratic-party style--as a loose, somewhat internally conflicted coalition of somewhat conservative interest groups. Theoretically, the base-mobilization could have worked forever. Unfortunately, keeping a base mobilized requires actually getting them what they want, and that's not happened, and, moreover, I don't think it's possible. Here's Will:

The party asserts that one of America's most common surgical procedures is murder. So, last year perhaps a million women and their doctors committed murder. However much a person deplores abortion and embraces that legal logic, nobody believes that either the legislation or the constitutional amendment that Republican platforms have praised will be passed. Hence the sterility of today's abortion debate. And hence the inclination of some social conservatives to focus on limiting abortion by changing the culture, and their willingness to evaluate candidates by criteria unrelated to abortion.

This is right, and it's also a case in point: For all of the trouble base-conservatives have gone to to elect conservatives, they've not actually gotten what they thought they were promised. What's more, I think conservatives have or will wake up to the fact that somebody like Rudy Giuliani will accomplish only slightly fewer of conservative goals than will somebody like George Bush. And while that will lower conservative turnout pretty significantly, my inclination is to believe that it'll also activate less-conservative voters in greater numbers.

Comments

[JimPortlandOR]

See my anatomical classification of the GOP base in the post below. Guliani hopes to win the the neo-cons and the corp-cons and pander (as mitigation of his liberal sins of the past) to the theo-cons. Immigration is a real problem for him as well as Bush - and its not clear to me how he manages that issue. For now, he seems to be following Bush/Rove in their attempt to bridge the chasm on immigration by being super-hawkish on 'terra' hoping the anti-brown-folks will be appeased. Of course the media won't explore these cravasses in the multiple bases of the GOP, so maybe he'll get a pass out of lack of information about the real Rudy.