The collapse of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid is surely one of the most striking developments of the 2008 campaign. Strategic mistake? I don’t think so. Rudy lost because he dissed social conservatives. In fact, the reason Giuliani missed those early primaries is because he dissed social conservatives. Giuliani’s attempt to take apart and reconstitute Ronald Reagan’s winning political coalition was his original sin. And Rudy’s primal transgression continues to shape the dynamics of 2008’s Republican presidential race. With Reagan’s erstwhile coalition now cast out of the garden of amity, only recognizing and understanding Rudy’s fault will allow us to find our way back.
I’m not saying Giuliani’s social liberalism doomed him to failure. On the contrary, I remember talking to a socially conservative state legislator from the midwest early in the campaign and finding, to my surprise, a genuine willingness to support Giuliani, while being fully aware of Rudy’s social liberalism. There was a conventional wisdom among knowledgeable conservatives during the campaign’s early stages that Giuliani’s support would collapse when the Republican base discovered his social liberalism. Yet to everyone’s amazement, Rudy kept rising in the polls. The broader public — including social conservatives — respected and admired the hero of 9/11, and wanted to back a winner in the general election. The problem is not that Giuliani’s personal social liberalism was unacceptable. The problem was Rudy’s failure to meet social conservatives halfway.
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Without caring much about social issues one way or the other, plenty of Rudy’s most enthusiastic backers supported him for his tough stand in the war on terror and his record of governing New York City. Yet a significant number of Rudy’s key supporters backed him precisely because of his social liberalism. Their hope was that a national victory for Rudy, powered by socially liberal Republicans and moderates, would break the Reagan coalition and leave social conservatives out in the cold. Although he would never have spoken so baldly, Giuliani gave far too many indications of belonging to this group himself.
Rudy’s initial campaign forays were marked by a series of awkward and ill-informed statements on the abortion issue. At a minimum, this betrayed a cavalier attitude toward a significant portion of the Reagan coalition. As time went on, however, it became clear that something more was at work. Rudy could have said that while his personal views on abortion were more liberal than many other Republicans, he nonetheless recognized some significant problems in the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence. A stance like that might have come close to winning Giuliani the nomination early on. Instead, in a bold and controversial move, Rudy pointedly refused to shift right on abortion. Despite his subsequent efforts to assure conservatives about Supreme Court nominations, and despite his very general condemnations of judicial activism, Rudy’s fundamental unwillingness to more openly compromise with social conservatives on life issues split the party and doomed his campaign.
