Rudy's crash and burn
The one consolation about the defeat of Rudy Giuliani is that anyone who devised such a crackpot strategy as totally ignoring a whole bunch of American voters in order to recklessly gamble upon Florida to deliver the Republican nomination should never have been let loose in the White House.
Well okay, it was a try.
The Clintons are said to fear Mc Cain. I'd have thought instead that the Democrats must be hugging themselves today, even while Hillary and Obama continue to slug it out. For in my view the Republicans have just torn up their strongest potential card: clarity and strength of purpose. John McCain’s political profile is muddy. On domestic issues, he’s a social liberal; on foreign affairs, he may be hawkish on Iraq but he’s also a Europhile and has the usual soggy prejudices about the Middle East. In other words, he reflects the ideological confusion now gripping western conservatism as it becomes progressively disorientated by the culture wars and, under the misleading banner of liberty, goes with the flow of cultural Marxism and the erosion of national identity and moral order. With the exception of gay rights and abortion, on which he is a social liberal, Guiliani stood against all that. Having famously drawn his ‘zero tolerance’ line in the sand in New York, we all knew he would draw it again where it really matters -- defending civilisation, most crucially of all, against the threat from without. For whatever reason, American Republicans didn’t buy it. Alas.
Maybe McCain will now show that he has what it takes to defend western culture, and will establish clear blue water between himself and Hillbama. But in a contest between a left-wing populist moral and cultural relativist and a conservative wannabe populist moral and cultural relativist, the left wins every time. They do it so much better. Why vote for the monkey, after all, when you can have the organ-grinder?