Much has been written and said about the Roger Ailes/News Corp/Rudy Giuliani connection, about how Fox News and all the News Corp properties are transparently working to secure Rudy both the GOP nomination and the White House. This post is not an effort to dispute those suspicions, or to contest the obvious prefence the Fox News Channel has shown for Giuliani among the Republican presidential contenders. But…..I was surprised to read a piece in the current News Corp-owned Weekly Standard about Rudy Giuliani that, while far from negative, was nevertheless compelling and not entirely flattering. The article, by Matthew Continetti, argues that Giuliani’s tactical shifts to the right and left over his career have been real but immaterial, because Giuliani’s broad modus operandi has always been guided by his dark perspective on the world in which we live, a perspective made dark by investigating and prosecuting so many truly unsavory characters. The nut paragraph of the piece:
He also happens to have been one of the most effective chief executives in modern American history. Some view his doggedness, his maximalist position on every issue and the tactics he adopts, as a form of “authoritarianism,” but that term is intended to insult rather than describe. It would be more accurate to call him a legalistic disciplinarian. And, indeed, one of the striking aspects of Giuliani’s career is that, while he has tacked right in his quest for the 2008 nomination, his worldview seems to have remained consistent at least since his prosecutorial days. And one word best describes it: grim.
Granted, the paragraph begins by stating, without qualification or proof, that Giuliani “happens to have been one of the most effective chief executives in modern American history,” a claim so obviously hyperbolic and biased (and meant for Ailes?) that it’s laughable. Just about every chief executive in American government during the 1990s was successful, including Bill Clinton, because federal and state treasuries were overflowing, by mid-decade, with the record tax revenues produced by muscular and sustained economic growth. Rudy, like most governors and mayors and other “chief executives”, was a lucky beneficiary of an historic economic boom. He had control over others things that determined how he would be viewed by New Yorkers and biographers, to be sure. But it’s just as true that, had the U.S. economy stagnated through his tenure as mayor, Giuliani would have a much harder time running on his record in City Hall, and no one would be calling him “one of the most effective chief executives in modern American history.”
But the rest of Continetti’s paragraph, and story, is worth reading. Rudy looks at the world and sees danger lurking in every shadow, criminals who deserve punishment, disasters waiting to happen. Is that the right disposition for a presidential nominee in 2008? It might be. What it’s not is at all reminiscent of the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan — or, for that matter, of any successful presidential candidate since Richard Nixon.