The Rudy-Romney dust-up; are they both right?
Things are getting quite nasty on the Republican side of the presidential race, especially between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. That these two would clash seems almost inevitable, given the stakes in New Hampshire where Romney leads but Giuliani is within striking distance. A Romney win in the Granite State, coupled with a win in Iowa, would give him a plausible claim to frontrunner status. A Giuliani win might represent a knockout blow to Romney.
The Washington Post offers this account of the weekend war of words between the two. Romney argues that Giuliani fails to measure up as “pro-life, pro-family and pro-traditional marriage” candidate. He also finds Rudy insufficiently anti-illegal immigration. Giuliani counters that Romney can’t validly claim “to being particularly conservative as governor of Massachusetts” and is actually running away from his one notable accomplishment as governor – expanding health insurance coverage to all state citizens.
In a sense, both candidates are right. As I contended here, Romney and Giuliani both governed their liberal jurisdictions as centrists in certain important respects.
Given the plausibility of their competing attacks, the main beneficiary would seem to be John McCain, who sees his two key New Hampshire rivals tarred, and who probably wins points for declining to attack them with comparable gusto. Yet McCain too has parted company with conservatives on key issues. And to some, Mike Huckabee is not a legitimate conservative at all, given his tax-and-spend approach to governing Arkansas. All of this explains why many were so eager for Fred Thompson to enter the race. But Thompson, whose record in the Senate was largely indistinguishable from McCain’s, has had limited success firing up conservatives since his entry.
In light of these competing impurities, many conservatives are likely to choose their man based less on specific issues and more on factors like perceived competence and leadership skill, personal qualities, and perhaps electability. This prospect is not lost on Romney and Giuliani, and they are attacking each other at this level too. As Byron York reports, Romney is coming after Rudy using a “cronyism” narrative that focuses on Bernard Kerik, while Giuliani is hitting Romney with an “authenticity” narrative that relies on the dramatic changes in some of Romney’s positions on key social issues.
Here the advantage goes to McCain who is vulnerable to neither a cronyism nor an authenticity narrative.
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