This may be nice , but I am still not voting for Mr. Giuliani, unless to prevent anoter bout of Clinton co-presidency.
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I'm Not Being Defensive!
If an exchange between Rudy Giuliani and top Democrats is a preview of next year's general election campaign, Republicans have reason to be a lot more confident than they have been these past few months. Fox News Channel's Brit Hume reports:
Washington woke up [Wednesday] to morning headlines that Rudy Giuliani predicted a "new 9-11" if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2008. Barack Obama responded that Giuliani has "taken the politics of fear to a new low." John Edwards said Giuliani's comments were "divisive and plain wrong." And Hillary Clinton called it "political rhetoric" that would not lessen the threat of terrorism.
The problem is Giuliani never said what the headlines claimed. It all started with a story in The Politico newspaper, which contained not a single quote to support its lead and headline. But it got picked up elsewhere nonetheless.
What Giuliani actually did say is what he has been saying for weeks, that Democrats would play defense instead of offense in the War on Terror, the same approach tried back before 9/11.
Late yesterday afternoon the Democratic National Committee sent an email bearing the signature of chairman Howard Dean (reproduced at Little Green Footballs), in which he misquotes Giuliani outright:
Rudy Giuliani should be ashamed.
The former New York City Mayor is politicizing September 11th in his 2008 presidential bid. Here's what he said at a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire:
"If a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001... Never ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for (terrorists) to attack us if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake, the Democrats want to put us back on defense!"
I won't let this wannabe Republican nominee get away with remarks like these.
In fact, the first sentence in the Giuliani "quote" was not something Giuliani said but something Roger Simon of The Politico wrote. The Democrat-friendly New York Times is more careful, but it manages to take Giuliani's words out of context:
In his two months on the campaign trail, the central animating theme of Rudolph W. Giuliani's presidential campaign has been that his performance as New York mayor on Sept. 11, 2001, makes him the best candidate to keep the United States safe from terrorists.
But when Mr. Giuliani broadened that message here on Tuesday night, saying that Democrats "do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us" and that if they were elected the United States would suffer "more losses," the response from his Democratic rivals was swift and pointed.
Rush Limbaugh has the actual "more losses" quote, and, contrary to the impression the Times gives, it is substantive and not pointedly partisan:
The question is going to be, "How long does it take, and how many losses do we have along the way?" And I truly believe if we go back on defense for a period of time, we can ultimately have more losses and it's going to go on much longer. The power of our ideas is so great we'll eventually prevail. The real question is, "How do we get there?" Do we get there in a way in which it is as expeditious as possible and with as little loss of life as possible, or do we get there in some circuitous fashion.
This is just the latest example of one of the oddest rituals of American politics: Democrats try to smear Republicans as mean and dirty by falsely accusing them of saying terrible things about Democrats. The classic example, to which we devoted a 2004 essay, is the plaint: Stop questioning my patriotism! As we wrote then:
Democrats themselves raised the issue of patriotism by defensively denying that they lacked it. A cardinal rule of political communication is never to repeat an accusation in the course of denying it ("I am not a crook"). These candidates "repeated" a charge no one had even made.
It's happening again. Now the claim that "if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11" is part of the political debate--thanks to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The Giuliani kerfuffle is an especially lovely example of the self-defeating nature of this Democratic tactic, if one can call it that. Giuliani's criticism of Democrats was that their approach to terrorism is to go "on defense," and the Democrats responded by getting all defensive. Kind of proves his point, doesn't it?
