Last week Steve Malanga, from the Manhattan Institute on this blog and in the New York Post made the case that Rudy Giuliani really was a real conservative, despite abortion, gay rights and gun control.
In the Post, Malanga wrote of Rudy:
He ran New York with a conservative's priorities – and delivered reform to a degree unprecedented in modern U.S. history.
TO those of us who observed Giuliani from the beginning, it was astonishing how fully he followed through on his conservative principles once elected
TODAY, Americans see Giuliani as presidential material because of his leadership in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but to those of us who watched him manage America's biggest city when it was crime-ridden, financially shaky and plagued by doubts about its future as employers and educated and prosperous residents fled in droves, Giuliani's leadership on 9/11 came as no surprise.
However, before September 11, 2001, Malanga was singing a different tune. In an article for City Journal published in 2001 BUT before September 11, Malanga criticized the New York State Republican Party for their failure to act as true conservatives.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_new_yorks_rep.html
It has spent lavishly, resisted broad tax cuts, shunned tort reform, championed environmental regulation, overpaid government employees, and emitted bonds with the glad-handed profusion of a Russian central banker.
In short, time and again the New York Republican party has abandoned its core message—the message of fiscal restraint, small government, and deregulation that got Pataki elected. Each time, the party has justified its surrender in the name of survival. Its strategists have promised that this "moderation"—which is the term they use to describe immoderate taxing, spending, and borrowing—would save the party.
And what did Malanga say about Giuliani, the man who he now says followed through on his conservative principles once elected –
Rudy Giuliani won the mayoralty of New York City, Gotham's first Republican mayor since John Lindsay's election in 1965. But if Lindsay had swept to City Hall as a liberal Republican and then abandoned the party altogether, Giuliani's brand of Republicanism was even odder. His chief political ally was Liberal party boss Ray Harding, and, although Giuliani began his tenure with recognizably Republican fiscal restraint and toughness on crime, he capped off 1994 by endorsing Cuomo over Pataki, observing that the Democrat's free-spending ways would benefit the city more.
That’s it! Not a word about Rudy’s pre-September 11 leadership, his tax cutting or his conservative principles.
Which Malanga should we believe?