I replay the classic footage:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/AD7dnFDdwu0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
I’ve been waiting for my favorite new political blog to mention this, but I guess I will have to do this myself. Other than youtube.com, does Ron Paul have any greater campaigner and promoter that Rudy Giuliani? Giuliani actually heard what Ron Paul said and decided to demonstrate what sort of uber-“patriotic” grandstanding Paul is standing against.
Could not he simply have said, “While we always need to be careful about what we do, I think Mr. Paul’s description of American policy is way to simplistic. In any case, it doesn’t matter. We have been attacked and we have become responsible for Iraq and while many understandably regret this, it is still irresponsible to act like we can simply ignore it and revert to a policy that may or may not have worked at different times.”
If he had said that or something like it in a dismissive but non-rancorous tone, he would have cut Paul off at the knees in terms of public debating. If he had said nothing at all, he would have still prevented a huge swell of interest in Paul.
(In fact, I wonder if the Ron Paul campaign paid off the Republicans who tried to bar him from future debates. What else could possibly explain such behavior guaranteed to garner both coverage and sympathy for Paul?)
What I’m trying to say is that Giuliani’s behavior shows an amazing lack of judgment due to a misreading of the American people or a desire to grandstand. He could be right in policy (which isn’t remotely the case, but save that for others to argue) and still this should mean that he has real problems in leadership.
Well, since I’m posting video, I must do more. Tucker Carlson is so much better than anyone at Foxnews, in my opinion, so here is a double treat.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/xVTlnlIMlkk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Oh, and who can be surprised at this reaction on the part of Giuliani:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/px11095pT6I" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Mark,
You may be right, but I think that you are missing a basic aspect of political strategy: When you have a multi-person race, the best of all possible outcomes is to have the discussion be about YOU and Candidate X – when candidate X can’t possibly win the nomination.
The point, for Giuliani’s political advisers, isn’t that this banter makes Giuliani look good to all Republicans. The chief benefit is that it dries up the publicity , and perhaps fund raising, from all of the other Republican candidates.
Furthermore, there is no good way for the other Republican candidates to respond to either Paul or Giuliani in this mini-debate. If they try to nuance Giuliani’s comments – they will be portrayed as soft on defense (that is the nature of sound bite campaigning).
Also, given that Giuliani has a very liberal political philosophy, he needs to capture the majority of the the pro-war Republican vote in order to win the Republican nomination.
It doesn’t matter how much you and I dislike Giuliani’s comments, because we were not going to vote for him anyway.
Rather than being a political gaff, I believe that the Giuliani campaign was both hoping and planning for an opportunity like this.
David
Good point, David. If true, I think (and hope) that he is simply miscalculating how much pro-war is going to do for him right now.
In a nutshell, if Giuliani gets the republican nomination, it’s a guarunteed win for the democratic candidate.
Ron Paul is really the only hope for the GOP at this point in the game, they will either realize that and endorse him or turn a blind eye and doom the republican party to marginality for a generation.
I don’t think Paul provides any hope for the party, but I’m glad he is heckling them!
I’m hoping for Fred Thompson. Otherwise, I think we’re probably going to face at least one term of Clinton, again–which as I was recently reminded means more war, not only overseas, but on our own.
Mark,
I submit to you that there is exactly one reason why Ron Paul has no chance to win the election: it is because American Christians are not against war. Were Christians consistently anti-war (even allowing for just-war) Paul is obviously the only republican candidate to vote for on that ground.
It seems like just as valid an issue to me as abortion. It involves large amounts of death and violence and the erosion of our public morals.
Also, thanks for making your site readable again. It got a little out of hand in the previous version.
The reason Giuliani responded the way that he did was because he understands the base, notice the applause that he received. He responded in a way that was favorable to those of us on the right. There’s a reason that Paul is under 1% in the polls, he’s a fringe candidate and viewed by many of us as the right’s Kucinich. Paul is not the great hope of the Republicans, that person doesn’t exist (in 2000 I was told that McCain was the only hope for the Republican party, I still tease the person who said it because she’s come to realize how stupid that comment was).
I’m a Christian who supports the war. I do so for a variety of reasons but chiefly because we had promised the Kurds and the Shiites that we would help them topple Saddam and we allowed them to be slaughtered without doing anything to help.
I would have a dim view of a Christian who would advocate pulling out of the area and allowing the Iraqis to fend for themselves against the viciousness of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Michael Yon has a great piece about how we are working with the Iraqis to drive al-Qaeda out of a city in the Anbar province. We are trying to stabilize the region and pulling out would mean that al-Qaeda would be able to terrorize the region with minimal resistance.
Michele, I am not sure that Paul is completely right on his immediate pull-out view, for exactly the reasons you say. Doug Wilson’s point that, if you break it, it’s yours, sounds compelling to me. Some days.
(Other days, when I hear about the kid who lost both his eyes and his hands… and I realize that, to make his “sacrifice” meaningful, we need more years of more such maimed youth… Those days I read poetry out loud to myself and pray for an immediate pull out. I know there would probably be horrors. But there are horrors all over the world right now that we are doing nothing about–probably including Afghanistan.)
On normal days, what makes me willing to consider Paul’s position viable on moral grounds is that we have been given every reason to believe that those who would keep us in Iraq would actually spread the war to other countries rather than try to stabilize it and withdraw. If the real agenda is more regime change, then removing all troops and abandoning the fourteen bases sounds like the only thing that can be done in response. If someone I felt I could trust came along (Fred? Are you out there?) then I wouldn’t necessarily vote for the anti-war candidate.
Beyond that, Ron Paul is admired quite apart from his policy recommendations because he tells the truth about past policies and that we are reaping what we have sown. Just to have him out there talking about history makes life more pleasant.
“I would have a dim view of a Christian who would advocate pulling out of the area and allowing the Iraqis to fend for themselves against the viciousness of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
I hope you’ll forgive me for putting it this way, but would you take a similar position regarding someone ending an adulterous affair? The affair may create certain dependencies, etc.
Yeah, but Paul, I could see a situation where a child was involved so that (while the adultery had to stop) there was no way to ethically cut off every aspect of the relationship.