Two Governors, a Senator, and a Mayor

^{Civil Liberties Profiles: Rudy Giuliani | Mike Huckabee | John McCain | Mitt Romney}

Photo: Eric Thayer / Getty Images.

I want to see Barack Obama elected as the next President of the United States, and I'm not going to pretend that I don't. Conventional wisdom tells me that, this being the case, I should throw my support behind the Republican candidate with the least chance of winning the general election.

But I can't do that, and I can't do that for two reasons:

1. I don't lie very well.
2. There's always a chance the Republican might win.

Also worth considering is the fact that, when you get right down to it, we have an incredibly good crop of Republican candidates this year compared to years past. Look back at 1996, for example, and the real Republican primary battle was between Bob Dole, who was no centrist, and Pat Buchanan, who made him look like Ted Kennedy by comparison. Someone, I think it might have been Rush Limbaugh (himself a moderate compared to Buchanan), remarked at one point that Pat Buchanan is so far to the right that he technically emerges from the left. The only person we had this year who sounded like Pat Buchanan was Tom Tancredo (see "French Politics, American Style"), and he received so little support from Republican voters that he dropped out weeks ago. Good for him, and good for the Republican Party.

I said that I support Barack Obama, but now would be a good time to mention that I'm not a Democrat. I'm an independent. I'm also a committed activist, and as a committed activist I want to see positive change in both parties--not just the party that happens to be less dangerous at the moment. I want to see a Republican nominee who will come closest to moving his party in the right direction on civil liberties.

From the way I've been talking so far (see "Is Ron Paul the Best Republican Presidential Candidate for 2008?"), you might think that candidate would be Ron Paul. But I've never been comfortable with his immigration policies or (more damningly) his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in recent weeks I've found a solicitation letter (Adobe PDF), signed by Dr. Paul, in which (among other things) he boasts that:

"I've been told not to talk, but these stooges don't scare me. Threats or no threats, I've laid bare the coming race war in our big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS (my training as a physician helps me see through this one.)[sic]"

This is apparently a reference to an entire seven-year corpus of white nationalist material published as part of the Ron Paul Report (see "Is Ron Paul a Racist?"), in which he or his ghostwriter refers to Martin Luther King Jr. as a violent pedophile, praises David Duke, calls the end of apartheid in South Africa "tragic," and, of course, refers in some detail to "the coming race war in our big cities" and "the federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS." Ron Paul's answer to this? He signed these letters and paid for these newsletters, he admits, but he had no idea what their actual content was or who wrote them--they were ghostwritten by a total stranger and then signed and published by him, sight unseen, for years on end. Whether or not he's telling the truth is a question I'll leave to you, gentle reader, but I can no longer consider him a viable civil liberties candidate. Barring some major new development, or human error on my part, this will be the last time I mention Dr. Paul on this site. There are some Libertarian Party candidates such as Christine Smith who share his small-government vision but not his troubling history, and I look forward to discussing them in a future blog entry.

Moving on...

The Republican field has winnowed down to four viable candidates. The least viable of these four is probably early national-poll frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, and that's too bad. I like Giuliani, and there's a lot to like about him. He's openly pro-choice and very strong on lesbian and gay rights, having signed New York City's 1998 domestic partnerships ordinance. And while most people think his finest hour was 9/11, I think he showed his true colors in 1985 as U.S. attorney in the biggest Mafia trials in our country's history--using the RICO Act to shut down New York's largest criminal syndicates. Haven't heard much about the Mafia over the past couple of decades? Rudy Giuliani's excellent and dogged performance as prosecutor is a large part of the reason why.

Giuliani's disadvantages? Well, in many ways they're as striking as his advantages. His record on Second Amendment issues is terrible. His record on First Amendment issues, which involved targeting "adult" businesses in New York, is almost as bad. He literally tried to evict homeless New Yorkers from city-run shelters, and only the New York State Supreme Court stopped him. And--worst of all--his record on civil rights is terrible. The NYPD was infamous under his tenure for racial profiling, along with suspicious deaths and beatings. I don't believe that Giuliani is personally a racist by any means, but he appears to be isolated from black communities, an isolation that probably prevented him from taking concerns regarding the NYPD as seriously as he should have. And he holds the distinction of being the only frontrunner of either major party to have an all-white staff--a staff that is also more than 90% male. (Mike Huckabee's, in contrast, is more than 60% female--a higher percentage of female staffers than Hillary Clinton.)

Giuliani also has a bad reputation on War on Terror related issues, though his positions on these issues tend to be better than Mitt Romney's. He condones waterboarding in "once in a lifetime, once in a decade" situations, leading me to wonder whose lifetime he has in mind; he has supported Bush's warrantless surveillance program; and he doesn't favor shutting down Guantanamo.

So how does Giuliani fare as a civil liberties candidate? Well, he's weak on First and Second Amendment issues, weak on post-9/11 issues, and he has an iffy history on civil rights. Where he's strongest, as a Republican candidate, is on culture war issues. Does this matter? From a symbolic perspective, yes--if the Republican Party were to nominate a candidate who is personally pro-choice and non-homophobic, it would be a tremendous blow to the Religious Right (see "Giuliani Reaffirms Support for Abortion Rights"). But from a policy standpoint, it's difficult to see a scenario where it would matter. He has already vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, and the venue for abortion rights is primarily the Supreme Court, so as a policy matter the fact that he's pro-choice is pretty much irrelevant. And on gay rights, while he has not become the crazed enemy of lesbian and gay Americans that Mitt Romney has become over the past several years, he has still shuffled on the issue over which the President has the greatest control--stating that "don't ask, don't tell" should not be altered "in a time of war," which would presumably include the full duration of his presidency. It's possible that he could be more open than most Republican presidents towards legislation such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and a national civil unions bill, but it's also possible that he wouldn't be. Presumably "don't ask, don't tell" extends not only to the current military policy, but also Giuliani's positions on these issues. So Giuliani isn't a bad candidate--but he's not a great candidate either, at least from a civil liberties perspective.

Mike Huckabee is the complete opposite of Giuliani in most important respects. He has the wrong views on social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, and is the darling of the Religious Right. Meanwhile, his views on other issues--from immigration to post-9/11 civil liberties abuses--are more libertarian than those of most of his opponents. Huckabee is considered the scariest candidate in the race by some secular progressives, but he doesn't bother me as much as, say, Romney.

Let's talk about why Mitt Romney's social conservatism is worse than Huckabee's--because at face value, they have some similarities. Both support the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and other states that recognize it. Both support overturning Roe v. Wade; Huckabee supports a constitutional amendment banning abortion. All this talk of right-wing constitutional amendments, by the way, is really a non-issue in practical terms because (a) constitutional amendments do not fall under the president's jurisdiction (they require a veto-proof two-thirds majority in Congress just to pass), and (b) the relevant amendments would never be ratified by the necessary three-quarters of the states. Still, if we believe in the power of the bully pulpit and want a president with the right opinions, their support of these silly amendments is certainly a significant strike against them.

So if they're both in the wrong on abortion and same-sex marriage, why do I think the former Southern Baptist minister is the less troubling candidate? Because Huckabee has shown a willingness to upset his base--supporting policies friendly to undocumented immigrants in Arkansas, for example, and calling for significant reform of the criminal justice system. Huckabee has even come out strongly against the use of torture, and called for the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. These are remarkably gutsy positions for a conservative Republican, whose candidacy depends on the support of the Religious Right, to take.

Romney, on the other hand, changes his shape depending on what he thinks his base might want. In 1994 and 2002, he ran in Massachusetts as a pro-gay, pro-choice candidate of the relatively secular Main Street Republican model. In 2005, when he started talking about the presidency, he transformed almost overnight into a right-wing firebrand--with nastier anti-gay rhetoric than his opponents. Since the president's primary authority over domestic policy is limited to a veto, which of these two candidates do you think would be more likely to turn against the party base to veto a poorly-written, draconian right-wing bill passed by some future Republican majority? Certainly not Romney, whose primary policy objective seems to be to gain the trust of social conservatives.

I would compare Romney and Huckabee's fight for conservative voters to Mississippi's 2002 U.S. House District 3 race between Rep. Chip Pickering (Republican) and Rep. Ronnie Shows (Democrat), brought about when redistricting merged their districts and forced the two incumbents to run against each other. Conventional wisdom says that the Democrat would be better on social issues, right? Well, not really, because Shows was so committed to fighting that conventional wisdom that he was willing to pull crazy right-wing stunts to gain the trust of socially conservative voters. That's how Rep. Shows became the first member of Congress, of either party, to propose a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Pickering voted for the amendment when it came up, but he didn't feel the need to propose it, presumably because he didn't have anything to prove. So looking at Huckabee and Romney, both being candidates of the Religious Right, I have to say Huckabee is less dangerous--because he has nothing to prove. He could veto all the right-wing legislation he wanted to, and he would still be considered a candidate of the Religious Right--but Romney would have to prove himself to the Religious Right every day. Both are unacceptable candidates, but Huckabee is less unacceptable.

That leaves John McCain. McCain is socially conservative, too, but a little more of a freethinker--he has called the Federal Marriage Amendment an un-Republican encroachment on state's rights, for example. And he has also shown a remarkable willingness to back down from his mistakes and do the right thing. The single event that crystallizes John McCain's appeal as a candidate, for me, is his position on the Confederate flag in South Carolina. He initially supported it eight years ago--but then criticized himself harshly for doing so, calling it a "sacrifice of principle for personal ambition." His renewed opposition to the Confederate flag, a hot issue at the time, may have cost him the 2000 South Carolina primary and given George W. Bush the nomination. So did he back down on it this year, as his campaign depended on those same Republican voters for support? No, he said he "could not be more proud of the majority" of South Carolina residents who had decided to scrap the old Confederate design--and he won the primary anyway.

So I don't think we need to worry so much about John McCain signing some obscene piece of legislation just to make his party supporters happy.

McCain has also shown himself to have the right views on the most important issue facing the next president: the growing power of the executive branch (see "Watch the Executive Branch"). And his opposition to the use of torture has been a central issue of his campaign--in the same year when Giuliani and Romney have frequently cited their pro-torture position as if it were a national security credential. And you don't have to look far to figure out why; McCain is the only major-party presidential candidate who has actually been tortured as a POW, which is why he still can't raise his arms past his shoulders.

Right now, McCain seems to be winning in the polls. He's the only Republican candidate who's neck and neck with Clinton and Obama in head-to-head matchups, and he's winning primaries left and right. Conventional wisdom says that if I want Barack Obama as the next President, I shouldn't want to see John McCain win the Republican nomination. But I do. No presidential election should put our most basic civil liberties at stake, and if John McCain becomes the Republican nominee, then I can rest easy that--regardless of the outcome of the presidential election--our most basic rights as citizens will probably be protected.

This is not to say that there aren't problems even with McCain, because there are problems with every candidate; I'll have more to say about that if he wins the nomination. But he's a great candidate--and if he had won the presidency eight years ago instead of George W. Bush, I'd have a lot less to blog about today. He's running for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination--and he deserves to win it.