A Desperate Smear

Mitt “4% behind a guy who isn’t even running” Romney today said of Rudy Giuliani, “He is pro-choice, he is pro-gay marriage, and anti-gun,” which is about one-third correct. This is a desperate ploy for support amongst social conservatives, but most conservatives, I expect, will prove smarter than this and Romney would be well-advised to back off from the comment.

1. Yes, Rudy is pro-choice. Recently, he’s tempered that with support for bans on partial-birth abortions and support for parental notification laws, as well as promising to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court. So far, there is no indication he intends to temper that position any further. I suspect Rudy’s position on the issue overall rather closely mirrors the plurality opinion of the country. This seems to be a winning plank for the ticket’s platform. Romney is more right than wrong about Rudy being pro-choice, but he’s also a very recent newcomer to the pro-life cause himself, whose sincerity of belief is very much to be doubted. (Note: If he were really a die-hard pro-lifer with the zeal of a sincere recent convert, Romney would have called Rudy “anti-life” and not “pro-choice.”)

2. No, Rudy is not in favor of same-sex marriage; he is in favor of civil unions or domestic partnerships providing similar legal benefits as marriage. (Just like President Bush.) This position is more than palatable to thoughtful conservatives, even those who oppose same-sex-marriage. I am not among that number, being in favor of removing gender restrictions on marriage altogether. But Rudy’s position is acceptable to me, too, since semantics aren’t as important to me on this point as substantive legal rights. Seems to me that it is also a nice not-quite-all-the-loaf position that has some play with America as a whole – gays are hardly popular, but most Americans generally have a “live and let live” attitude about them, even in very conservative places I’ve been like Knoxville and Palmdale. So while restriction of the use of the word marriage doesn’t make sense to me (I say we should call it what it is), it does matter to a lot of people, and Rudy’s position is congruent with that concern. So Romney is just wrong here.

3. No, Rudy is not anti-gun, although he does favor mandatory licensing for gun ownership. In 2000, he spoke about the Second Amendment and New York’s gun control laws: “I do not think the government should cut off the right to bear arms. My position for many years has been that just as a motorist must have a license, a gun owner should be required to have one as well. Anyone wanting to own a gun should have to pass a written exam that shows that they know how to use a gun, that they’re intelligent enough and responsible enough to handle a gun.” This position, like the other two, strikes pretty close to the way most Americans feel. Again, it’s not a perfect mirror of my own position (you should be able to own guns until you demonstrate that you can’t be trusted with them) but it’s an acceptable one, and I certainly don’t think being in favor of licensing is being opposed to guns. Romney is more wrong than right on this point.

I guess Governor Romney is not happy with polling in fourth place among the die-hard, no doubt heavily Baptist, conservatives of South Carolina. The McCain campaign is apparently shopping anti-Giuliani smear material, too – yet Giuliani remains the GOP front-runner despite all of these early attacks focused on him and McCain, the only major candidate with good conservative policy credentials, remains a non-starter with the right wing. Perhaps that’s because these hard-core conservatives realize that they’re better off with a Republican in the White House than a Democrat. At least then, they’ll have a seat at the table. So they see that Rudy’s the only Republican running who has a credible shot of winning the election now that even died-in-the-wool Republicans recognize that the Bush Administration has chained a bloody albatross slightly larger than the state of California to our necks.