Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Giuliani in 2008?

(Reprinted from the issue of September 9, 2004)

After the recent ordeal of Democratic oratory, I dreaded listening to the Republican convention, with particular apprehension about hearing Rudy Giuliani on opening night. I’ve never liked him to begin with, but his apotheosis after the 9/11 attacks (Time magazine preposterously named him Person of the Year, though it was Osama bin Laden who’d made all the headlines in 2001) made him more irritating than ever. He refused, as mayor of New York, to accept a huge Saudi charitable donation for widows of the city’s firemen who’d died on 9/11 because it came with advice about U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast. His sordid marital scandals helped destroy his senatorial race against Hillary Clinton.

Above all, he has been one of the most prominent pro-abortion voices in the Republican Party. Yet nominal conservatives, more pro-war than anti-abortion, adore him.

Still, Giuliani’s opening-night speech was simply a corker, one of the most powerful partisan Republican convention speeches since the late, great Walter Judd’s classic keynote address in 1960. Giuliani wisely avoided shouting and violent rhetoric. Instead, he minced John Kerry with gentle but hilarious mockery; I found myself laughing aloud several times, forgetting my disagreements with him. The crowd roared.

It was a masterly job, and maybe the best analogy is an ominous one: Ronald Reagan’s famous TV speech for the Goldwater campaign in 1964, which instantly made him a major figure in the GOP. If Bush loses, Giuliani may be the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. His neocon admirers are already drooling at the prospect. He has a powerful base, and few peers as a campaigner. He’s a liberal who doesn’t sound like a liberal.

Will the Republicans quietly throw in the towel on abortion by 2008? If they reckon that’s the only way to regain the presidency, they probably will. Already they seem as eager to show their “tolerance” (protecting the unborn is now “intolerant,” you see) as the Democrats are to show their admiration for tough war heroes.

On the second night of the convention, the oratorical level plunged. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had his moments (“Today someone told me, ‘You’re as good a governor as you were an actor.’ What a cheap shot!”), and he wasn’t at all bad; but he couldn’t touch Giuliani. His paean to America as the land of opportunity was touching at times, the sort of thing Republican crowds like to hear; Democratic crowds prefer victim-stories to success-stories. All the same, there was something empty about it, for Arnold, like Rudy, conveys little sense that America faces a deep moral crisis. There will be no success stories for millions of unborn children who will die even if the United States defeats terrorism.

After Arnold came Laura Bush, and I wish I could be gallant about her speech. Unfortunately, it was banality itself, delivered in a scratchy, almost raucous voice. Like her husband, she moves effortlessly from praising private initiative to boasting about increased social spending, with no sense of contradiction. Also like her husband, she is addicted to sentimental cliché. To hear them tell it, America just gets better and better, and the only cloud on the horizon is the possibility of Democratic victory. As long as we elect Republicans, everything will be fine.

The Republicans do have one great thematic strength. Their optimism may be cloying, even jejune, but liberalism has lost its old confidence that it represents a better future. That idea just won’t sell anymore. It’s passe. So the Democrats are driven to wailing that the Republicans are dangerous. That may be, but to the extent that it’s true the reason is that the GOP is now as committed to expanding government, in their own way, as the Democrats are.

The alternatives this year are national and international socialism. Neither party proposes a serious reduction in government power, let alone a return to constitutional scale. Both parties have their slogans, but neither can enunciate an inspiring principle that differentiates it from the other.
 
Traitors, Large and Small

The FBI says it has found another Israeli agent in the Pentagon. According to news accounts, it has been scrutinizing one Lawrence Franklin, who has a top-secret security clearance and is suspected of passing on classified information about Iran to Israel; he has worked in both countries.

Franklin works under Douglas Feith, the pro-Likud undersecretary of defense who is part of the neoconservative cabal that has been pushing for war against Arab and Muslim countries for years (they started long before 9/11). This group sees the “war on terror” as part of a “World War IV,” and the “axis of evil” as something even vaster than Bush does.

Defending Franklin against the charge of espionage is Michael Ledeen, another hawkish neocon with longstanding Likud ties. The New York Times dryly identifies Ledeen as “a friend of Mr. Franklin,” which for observers of the neocons pretty much seals the case against Franklin. He might as well have Jonathan Pollard vouching for his loyalty.

The conservative movement and also the Bush administration have been amazingly indifferent to the neocon infiltration. Will Bush now purge these people from positions of power, as Harry Truman once purged the Soviet agents and sympathizers left over from the days of the Stalin-loving Franklin Roosevelt?

Probably not. Bush is as devoted to Ariel Sharon (“a man of peace”) as FDR was to “Uncle Joe” Stalin (“a Christian gentleman”). Even if he dimly realizes he has been lured into fighting Israel’s enemies rather than America’s, he isn’t a man to admit and correct a mistake. U.S. policy in the Mideast is unlikely to change, and the people who have designed it for their own purposes will almost surely stay right where they are as long as Bush remains in office.

For a powerfully incisive review of how we got into this situation, I recommend Patrick Buchanan’s new book, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. Though very hard-hitting, it makes no wild charges, but sticks to the indisputable record.

The state of Israel, whom our politicians regularly salute as “our only reliable ally in the Mideast,” has double-crossed the U.S. for decades, but always with impunity. Even the assault on the Liberty in 1967 and the 1985 exposure of Pollard’s spying didn’t result in so much as a congressional inquiry, let alone an interruption of the billions in U.S. aid annually sent to Israel. Franklin may go to prison, as Pollard did, but the Israelis will assuredly pay no price. Worse traitors than Franklin, assuming he is one, will see to that.


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Joseph Sobran