After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday.
Well, if you want to put some distance between you and the pack, this is the way to do it.
It could, of course, put him some distance behind the pack, scuttle his candidacy. My suspicion, though, is that it may actually strengthen his candidacy. My suspicion is that there are a lot of Republicans out there who are dismayed by the constant pandering to “the base”; who in fact are fed up with the base, have come to believe to believe that the base, which helped propel the party and the conservative movement itself to power, now is detrimental to the party.
The rap on the Democratic Party as it rusted in the 1970s, and to an extent now, is that it had become a motley collection of interest groups. The Republican Party itself now bears a resemblance to this; though the interest groups are far fewer in number, they wield considerably more influence within the party than any one left-wing group could have. The perception - among Democrats, a growing number of libertarians, among moderate Republicans themselves - is that these interest groups have come to dominate the party, to define it. And the fear, then, is that the Republican Party, by permitting this, may cease to be a truly national party.
Giuliani’s move either short-circuits that - or, if he’s chewed up and spit out by the culture warriors, if his candidacy now fails, he reinforces it, he hastens it. But on another level, isn’t it curious - nice - to see one of the perceived front-runners say, “Screw it, I’m not going to pander.” Giuliani’s past, of course, makes that pandering virtually impossible anyway. So maybe this is less bravery on his part than a realization that this might be his only hope.
