I also hold Thomas Sowell in high regard. Since he is not in the race here are my thoughts. We have five candidates still in the race, Huckabee, McCain, Romney, Thompson and Guiliani. Prognostication number one. Huckabee Thompson and Romney will fade away and the main battle will be between McCain and Guiliani. Ron Paul presents a non-issue that can, at most, be a spoiler at the margins.
Both McCain and Guiliani have significant problems with the Republican base, but they each have some appeal for independents. First McCain. He opposed the Bush tax cuts in 2001 which was not only wrong politically but a display of poor judgment on economic matters. Those tax cuts were absolutely crucial to overcoming the results of 9/11 and the collapse of the dot.com boom. In addition McCain’s trashing of the Pharmaceutical industry and advocating drugs to be re-imported from Canada betrays a lack of understanding of markets, research costs and returns, and drug safety. His pushing of so-called comprehensive immigration reform rather than first securing the border and later dealing with the twelve million of so illegal immigrants already in the country did not sit well with the base. McCain -Feingold campaign finance reform restricted free speech on the most important of all issues, political views. Many Republicans have not yet forgiven McCain for this trip across the partisan isle. McCain=s leadership of the Agang of fourteen@ did not sit will with Republicans but it must be acknowledged that it did result in the two best Supreme Court justices since Scalia was confirmed, namely John Roberts and Samuel Alioto.
McCain=s strength with Republicans is his steadfast support of the war in Iraq especially during the time when things were going badly and many Republicans were bailing out. McCain long advocated more troops in Iraq and a military surge and the results of the surge obviously are positive. He is pro life. As a naval aviator and long time prisoner of war in Vietnam he has earned respect and admiration. His absolutist position that waterboarding is torture, must be outlawed and must never be used under any circumstances, understandable as it is from his personal experiences as a prisoner of war, is not a good policy to bind the United States to considering the nature of our enemy.
Rudy Guiliani has a different set of problems with the Republican base. He is not pro life. His judicial appointments as a Republican Mayor of heavily Democrat New York City, while understandable, do not sit well with some Republicans. His suggestion of his friend and business partner Bernard Kerik to President Bush to head Homeland Security was abysmally bad judgment. For Christian conservatives his three marriages and his especially messy second divorce from Donna Hanover present significant problems. Guiliani=s strength is two-fold; leadership as Mayor of New York City and his strong position on confronting the threat we face from the global Islamic jihad both at home and abroad, as demonstrated by his recent essay in City Journal. As Mayor of New York he confronted and reduced crime and provided much needed leadership and stability when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were hit on 9/11.
Prognostication two, the mother of all prognostications. Either McCain or Guiliani can and will defeat either Clinton or Obama in the general elections. Republicans better understand the importance of voting and, swallowing hard, voting for either McCain or Guiliani despite their reservations. The stakes are way too high to allow the Democrats to control both the Congress and the Presidency at this time of war. This is not 1941.
