ABC's politics-watchers at "The Note" report today that a few extremist conservatives are upset at the possibility of Rudy Giuliani being the Republican nominee in '08: "The GOP ballot is still filled with question marks -- and the one next to former mayor Rudolph Giuliani's name is growing bigger by the day. This is Rudy's nightmare (and should be just as scary for everyone in a party that's in growing danger of coming apart at its seams): "A powerful group of conservative Christian leaders decided Saturday at a private meeting in Salt Lake City to consider supporting a third-party candidate for president if a pro-choice nominee like Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination," Salon.com's Michael Scherer reports.
"Giuliani is beyond the pale," Richard Viguerie, a veteran conservative activist and author, told ABC's Jake Tapper after the meeting. "Maybe it's just time to never support another Republican establishment candidate, and support principled conservative candidates -- win or lose." This is about Giuliani, but it's also a measure of how former senator Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., has failed to unite/excite/appease conservatives. "In his short time on the campaign trail, Thompson has demonstrated a moderate temperament and an independent streak belying hype that he would be the answer to [James] Dobson's prayers," Tapper writes. "
Even Fred Thompson isn't good enough for them.
This is dumb, just dumb. First of all, Rudy Giuliani, while not perfect, is no liberal; he's an acceptable conservative candidate. I've been presenting evidence on this point regularly over the past months, and will continue to do so. And these guys were all begging Fred Thompson to get into the race---and now suddenly he appears to be unsatisfactory, too.
You know, back in the old days of the 20th century, we used to see just this kind of thing, only it mainly occurred among Communists. They constantly argued over who was the "purest" Marxist, the most devoted to the principles of Lenin, the reddest "Red." Stalinists fought with Trotskyists, Khrushchevian communists fought with Maoist communists, they all battled to expel the heretics and the infidels and to banish impure thought. One of the great founding senior editors of National Review magazine, James Burnham, who used to be a Trotskyite in his younger days, called this kind of thing "sectarian" thought, and worried that conservatives would fall into the same trap. He always tried to warn the Right away from it.
Now I see it happening again. All this kind of third party talk will do is divide conservatives, elect a Democrat (who I guarantee you will do a ton of things that we won't like, and will make the Bush administration look like a conservative heyday), and banish conservatives to political irrelevance. We cannot and must not go down that path.
