NEW YORK -- I'm not sure why, because it should have been obvious by now, but one of the biggest epiphanies out of the week in New York has been the fact that while Democrats and detractors are trying to wish George W. Bush away this November, a whole lot of Republicans are thinking about the post era, too. They just hope it comes four years later.
The most obvious examples, of course, came on opening night when John McCain and Rudy Giuliani delivered from the convention floor what might be regarded as the first campaign speeches of the 2008 campaign.
The moderates were supposed to soften the image of the party. Instead, they used the opportunity to burnish their conservative bona fides. McCain, whose antipathy toward Bush is legendary, delivered a heated pro-president speech worthy of the most right-wing elements of the party. He not only endorsed the rightness of the Iraq War, which he clearly, genuinely believes in, he also proselytized on behalf of an administration with which he has constantly disagreed.
And while it is not uncommon for the stray cows to come home in tough political times, McCain has built his Everest-sized political reputation on challenging his party, on being the outcast, the prodigal son. Monday, the desperado came down from his fences and let himself love Bush.
On Bush's decision to invade Iraq, McCain said, “For his determination to undertake it, and for his unflagging resolve to see it through to the end, President Bush deserves not only our support but our admiration.”
No remnants of his former disdain for the president there.
“Maybe McCain wants to be on the ticket in 2008,” says one GOP operative.
But for me, the most amazing performance so far has been Giuliani, who as of now has firmly established himself as a post-W.-era contender for his party's nomination. And he did it by closely allying himself with the president and offering up one of the most effective defenses of the Bush doctrine so far. He compared George W. Bush to Ronald Reagan and to Winston Churchill, and then, using an explanation he has often employed on his own behalf, said, “Some call it stubbornness; I call it principled leadership.”
And while it's hard to figure out how an abortion-rights Republican from New York persuades the GOP base to get behind him, stranger things have happened.
As McCain, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said, “There is a mysterious cycle to human events.”
For me, though, Giuliani was the absolute manifestation of that truism. When I saw Mario Cuomo walking through Madison Square Garden on Garden on Monday, I was reminded of a time when Giuliani occupied a very different place in the political cosmos. Ten years ago, in the heated fall of 1994, I remember being in City Hall watching Giuliani endorse Cuomo, the three-term incumbent Democrat, over the nominee of his own party, a guy named George Pataki.
Back then I wrote: “For partisans on both sides, the mayor's Cuomo endorsement had the effect of a grenade tossed into a subway car. Members of both parties exploded, some in rage and others in gratitude. Republicans called him a traitor; Democrats called him bold.”
Ester Fuchs, who was the head of Barnard's Urban Policy Institute has said, "The reality for Rudolph Giuliani is that he is on the fringe of the Republican Party anyway because he is a moderate.”
And the then-executive director of the New York GOP assessed the betrayal this way: "There is a question of trust that has been significantly eroded now. What Rudy did was a betrayal of people who were there for him at his toughest hour. … How he comes back from that is up to him."
Monday night, of course, was the final confirmation that he has indeed come back. Still, Pataki did win in 1994, and he's often mentioned as another one of those comers with his eye on the 2008 presidential nomination.
Clearly, much like Bush's re-election prospects, Giuliani's popularity within the GOP rests on his response to September 11. The question now is what kind of half-life 9-11 has as propulsion fuel for political ambitions, because clearly things change.
At the time of the Cuomo endorsement, Lee Meringoff, the prominent pollster who runs the Marist Institute of Public Opinion, told me jokingly, "I suppose what it means is that there won't be a Republican national convention in New York City, and, wherever it is, that he won't get good seats."
Things change.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
