Loading ...According to the Associated Press, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani pulled a Katherine Harris.
CONCORD, N.H. — Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani released his latest slate of New Hampshire supporters last week. One problem: Not all of them back the former New York City mayor.
Alongside a former state GOP chairman, a congressman and an executive councilor who do support Giuliani, a handful of people made the list of 125 supporters despite their objections.
It’s certainly rare at this point but McCain attacked Romney.
McCain was asked about Mitt Romney’s statement that he didn’t think we should expend energy going after bin Laden (I’m paraphrasing). McCain responded that he doesn’t normally comment on his rivals for the nomination, but would make an exception in this case because it is a national security matter. He said that he thought Romney’s statement betrayed “naivete” because bin Laden is an important symbol in the psychological war against the terrorists. McCain cited approvingly the Israeli model, where, when someone harms their people, they will follow him to the ends of the earth to obtain redress. Or they used to, anyway.
It’s Brownback and Huckabee’s only chance and road to the Republican nomination. Huckabee’s definitely making a play for their votes.
Gawker checks out Giuliani’s web and finds out he’s got no debate watch parties in New York.
The Repubs are going to debate on Thursday, the Democratic debate was silly but mostly unified and positive. How will the Thursday Repub debate play out?
Strong enough to force Giuliani to change a position he’s held, one that he’s on video supporting, one that he said Republican and he would have to “learn to disagree over.” Giuliani flips on civil unions.
You expected it from Romney but not Giuliani.
Below is a picture from the announcement e-mail for Senator John McCain (R-Arizona).
Puts a whole new spin on the nickname “St. McCain,” don’t you think?
The base must need crazy red meat if Giuliani’s has to say that electing a Democrat would cause another 9/11. It’s not like Bush was president when on September 11th, 2001. Oh wait! If Giuliani’s willing to shred his limited legacy on his one positive narrative on something like this this early, you know he’s desperately trying to keep the base’s attention.
Now the question is whether the Politico has a video of this moment. These kinds of weird red meat moments don’t usually play well for the candidate and certainly don’t look much better out of print. Case in point. George Felix Allen.
Update: Greg Sargent says that Giuliani’s polemic has now turned into a flip-flop. All while the anti-choice Repubs who make up the Republican base continue to hammer Giuliani on abortion.
Huffington Post, Yahoo and Slate Magazine will team up with PBS newsman Charlie Rose to conduct the first-ever web-only presidential debate. Reports are that the debates, one for both Democratic and Republican candidates, will be held following Labor Day.
The announcement is set for tomorrow, according to the Associated Press.
“It was clear to me, the 2008 campaign was going to be dominated by what’s happening on line _ new technologies, new media like never before,” Huffington said. She then contacted Rose and Slate editor Jacob Weisberg to form a partnership to produce the forums.
Yahoo Inc., the largest provider of online news, will host the debates and provide the technological expertise to produce them.
Candidates will be able to participate from far-flung locations, speaking and interacting with one another before separate video cameras. The video will also appear on the Slate and Huffington Post Web sites.
Marc Santora and Sam Roberts of the New York Times have an article out today documenting Rudy Giuliani’s ways of talking about immigration and how, to borrow their words, his tone has shifted now that he’s in the presidential race. As mayor of New York Giuliani held what would be considered fairly liberal positions on immigration — New York has a very large immigrant community, both legal and illegal. Giuliani used to work to protect rights and services available to illegal immigrants; now he’s falling in line with the rest of the Republican field and kow-towing to the Dan Riehl wing of the Republican Party.
I’ll leave aside that if this article were written by Adam Nagourney about a position held by a top-tier Democratic candidate, Giuliani’s shift to the right on an issue important to the far right of the Republican base, his rhetorical and philosophical move would have been repeatedly described as “flip-flopping.”
What concerns me is that for however bad Giuliani was as mayor of New York before 9/11 (watertiger has a lot on this) he has shifted positions on one of the few issues where his old stance could actually add substance and value to the Republican Party’s debate on immigration. “In the 1990s, Mr. Giuliani saw the city’s great number of immigrants as integral to the work force and a politically potent key to the resurgence of a struggling New York.” The same could be said for America. Those that try to gloss over the value of immigrants in the fabric of American life do so at the peril of the middle class, as the Drum Major Institute extensively reports. I believe that there is a real space for Republicans who want to talk about immigration but aren’t going to go the route of confounding Mexican laborers with Al Qaeda terrorists.
Giuliani would have been the natural guy to pull the conversation back towards the sensible. His tough on crime veneer did not diminish his ability to say the right things about immigration when he was mayor. After all, the place that the debate needs to go is the place where Giuliani used to be.
But for Giuliani to be a serious contender for the Republican nomination, he has to appease anti-immigration voters in Iowa and South Carolina and answer questions about immigration with tough, law and order style language. Does it mean that he is actually believing what he says? Who knows. He’s definitely not saying what he used to believe, though, as Santora and Roberts well document. That signals a loss in the debate within the Republican Party on immigration and subsequently will decrease the chance that the national dialogue on immigration includes sober voices from the right on policy.
Technorati Tags: Dan Riehl, immigration reform, Rudy Giuliani
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