Will Pat Robertson’s endorsement help Rudy Giuliani win the support of wary social conservatives? The answer is most likely “yes” — at least a little. The benefit to Giuliani is not that millions of evangelical Christians will now vote for him because Robertson told them to; the old “easily led” canard was never true in the past and is certainly not true today. Rather, the benefit to Giuliani is that Robertson’s endorsement will help Giuliani shake his image as a candidate who can’t win evangelical support and therefore can’t win the Republican primaries.
At yesterday’s announcement, held at the National Press Club in Washington, Robertson said he chose to support Giuliani because the social issues with which he, Robertson, was mostly closely associated in the past are not the top issues facing Americans in the 2008 election. “To me, the overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the bloodlust of Islamic terrorism,” Robertson told reporters. The second-most important issue, Robertson said, is fiscal discipline. Only after that, he suggested, are the social issues, with the overriding priority being the makeup of the federal courts. “Uppermost in the mind of social conservatives is the selection of Supreme Court justices,” Robertson said, and Giuliani “has assured the American people that his choices for judicial appointments will be men and women who share the judicial philosophy of John Roberts and Antonin Scalia.”
After the news conference, I sat down with Giuliani to discuss the biggest hurdle facing his judicial appointments strategy: the fact that a significant number of conservatives simply do not believe his pledge to appoint strict constructionist judges to the courts.
“I don’t understand why,” Giuliani told me. “Because look, if I was going to try to fool them, I would just change my positions. I would just fool them, right? I’m not suggesting anybody else has done that. So I think people should have the sense that I’m straight with them. And if they just look at my history and background, who do they think I’m going to appoint? All of my friends, all of the people I’ve associated with, all the people I respect, the vast majority of them would fall into the category of conservative thinkers, conservative lawyers, and strict constructionist judges.”
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