Why Rudy Guiliani Is Destined to Fall

By Paul Waldman, TomPaine.com. Posted March 1, 2007.

According to the latest polls, Rudy Giuliani has a commanding lead over his rivals for the 2008 Republican nomination for president. Though polls this early mostly measure name identification (ask Joe "Mentum" Lieberman, who was leading the Democratic pack at this time four years ago), it's hard to ignore the good feelings Giuliani generates among the GOP faithful.

Yet at the same time, conventional wisdom has it that as conservative Christian voters learn more about Giuliani -- specifically, his positions on abortion and gay rights and his marital history (infidelity along the way to three marriages), the support will quickly fade.

This conventional wisdom is partly correct, but not for the reasons we usually hear from the talking heads. The problem conservative voters will have with Giuliani isn't just about disagreement on issues, and it certainly isn't about bad behavior in his personal life. It's about the fact that no matter how hard he tries, Giuliani just isn't going to be able to convince them that he's part of their tribe.

The entirety of Giuliani's appeal, of course, is built on the fact that on the day of 9/11, he managed to hold a series of press conferences without wetting his pants. And so he has left no doubt that 9/11 will be the beginning, middle and end of his presidential campaign; as a recent headline in The Onion put it, "Giuliani To Run For President of 9/11."

No one could accuse him of failing to grasp an opportunity when he sees it: Giuliani has turned himself into a one-man September 11, Inc., charging $100,000 a pop to give speeches touting his steely resolve in the face of terror. When it comes to exploiting the memory of 9/11 for personal gain, George W. Bush has nothing on Rudy.

But for all the benefit he has reaped -- including the prevailing idea that Giuliani somehow has credibility on foreign affairs and national security, when his experience in both arenas is basically zero -- he is destined to fall. That fall should be one of the more interesting political stories we've seen in a while, but it's important to understand the reasons which factors will cause the GOP electorate to spit him out like a rotten peanut, and which won't. Commentators tend to lump Giuliani's positions on abortion and gay rights with his personal history. It's the former that will matter, and the latter that won't.

For all the talk of "family values" and the passionate condemnation of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, conservatives are enormously understanding when it comes to their own. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out recently conservatives don't seem to care whether their leaders have violated the personal morality they claim to hold:

Two of the most admired political figures among Christian conservatives -- Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich -- have the most shameful, tawdry and degenerate personal lives (using the claimed standards of that political faction). Yet the gross disparity between their personal conduct and the religious and moral values they espouse has not injured their standing in the slightest among the 'values voters.'

And with Rudy it's even worse. It's not just that he's been married three times, and that he committed adultery; the way he treated his second wife was positively sadistic. As their marriage was crumbling, he paraded down the street in front of photographers with his then-mistress and now wife, Judi. He then informed his wife that he was leaving her -- via a press conference.

But Greenwald is right that none of that will matter. What GOP voters want to know is, are you one of us or not? And what makes a candidate "one of us"? That tribal identity is formed by one thing above all else: Do you hate the right people?

That may be a bit crude. But the demarcation of in-groups and out-groups is the key to tribal politics. Identity is defined not only by knowing who's in your group, but more critically, who's outside it. As Merle Haggard sang in 1969's "Okie From Muskogee," "We don't make a party out of lovin'/ We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo/ We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy/ Like the hippies out in San Francisco do."

Ever since "Okie," conservatives have looked to popular culture to provide emblems of identity, ways they can define themselves as opposed to the kind of people they don't like. Every time you tune your radio to a country station or sit down to watch a stock car race, it's almost as good as punching a hippie in the face.

Most of the culture-war issues that matter to conservatives have something to do with sex. Let's take abortion, where Rudy is famously out of step with his GOP brethren. The point here isn't just that they differ with him on an important issue, in the way that a Democrat who supported the Iraq war would have problems with Democratic voters. Abortion is fundamental to conservatives because it relates to sex and thus defines an entire worldview.

To conservatives, abortion isn't so much about the welfare of fetuses as it is about the status of women and the nature of sex. Opposition to sex "without consequences" is key to the maintenance of the border between the in-group and the out-group. This is where the rape and incest exceptions come from: victims of rape and incest got pregnant not because they willingly had sex (which only sluts do, of course), but through no fault of their own. Their sexual purity is intact, and as such they need not be punished by being forced to carry their pregnancy to term. Either you think (or at least will proclaim publicly) that sex outside of marriage is sinful and women who engage in it should be punished, or you don't. And if you support legal abortion, you don't.

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Paul Waldman is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America and author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.

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