Giuliani Tracker

Rudy's in South Carolina

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani says he's lined up county chairmen for his Republican presidential campaign on South Carolina's coastal counties surrounding Charleston.

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Rudy Giuliani Criticizes John Edwards on Taxes, Barack Obama on Diplomacy

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, who has called Democrats "the party of losers," specifically criticized John Edwards and Barack Obama on Friday for their proposals on tax reform and diplomacy.

One day after lashing out at Democrats for seeking a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq -- and drawing a sharp rebuke, Giuliani singled out Democratic rivals Edwards and Obama.

Edwards offered a proposal on taxes Thursday that calls for increasing the rates for the wealthy and providing breaks for the middle class. The plan would raise the top tax rate on long-term capital gains.

"This is a Democratic program to drive businesses and jobs out of the United States of America," Giuliani said at a restaurant. "Capital gains are realized by a lot of middle-class people who have investments in mutual funds. This is a tax on everybody."

On Monday, Obama suggested that as president he would be willing to meet with leaders of nations such as Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea without preconditions -- a notion that has drawn scorn for his Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Giuliani called it a "terrible mistake," adding: "Fidel Castro is a dictator and he is a murderer. He should not be visiting with U.S. presidents."

On Thursday, during a stop in Houston, Giuliani called Democrats "the party of losers" for demanding a scheduled pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq.

"Democrats have already declared we've lost," the former New York mayor said. "It's really strange. The Democrats want to give our enemies a timetable."

That drew a quick retort from Democratic candidate Sen. Joe Biden.

"It is absurd for Rudy Giuliani to call Democrats 'losers' after five years of failed Republican policies in Iraq," the Delaware senator said in a statement issued Friday.

Biden said cheap shots wouldn't make the United States or its troops any safer.

"Giuliani and the rest of the Republican candidates continue to cling to this administration's failed policy that a strong central government can be propped up in Iraq," Biden said. "If these are the positions he wants to defend, I invite him to debate me on these important topics."

Giuliani sidestepped a question on whether embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should resign, saying the case has been distorted by partisanship in Washington.

"I think in the last six months it is quite possible the Democrats in Congress have set a record for subpoenas," he said.

Giuliani Says Democrats Party of Losers

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani called Democrats "the party of losers" for demanding a scheduled pullout of American troops from Iraq.

 

"Democrats have already declared we've lost," the former New York mayor said during a campaign stop at a Houston diner. "It's really strange. The Democrats want to give our enemies a timetable. Never in history of war has a retreating army been asked to give a timetable.

"I'm for victory," Giuliani said. Democrats, he said, are "living in a world where they refuse to admit the existence of Islamic terrorism," he said.

He worked a breakfast crowd for about a half-hour at the Avalon Diner, many of the people drawn to the nearly 70-year-old restaurant adjacent to Houston's exclusive River Oaks neighborhood by e-mails from his campaign.

"It made my day, made my week," Linda Trinh, 29, said.

Giuliani sipped two cups of coffee -- black, with artificial sweetener -- with diner owners Coy and Bambi Lynn Ramsey, then left a tip of $2 and some change.

"This sure beats talking to a screen on You Tube," Coy Ramsey said, taking a shot at the format of a debate earlier this week involving Democratic presidential candidates.

Giuliani, who had several fundraisers scheduled Thursday in the Houston area, touted his background as a federal prosecutor and as mayor, saying that unlike the top three Democratic contenders, he had executive experience.

His law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, is in Houston.

Giuliani said he would take the offensive on terrorism, balance the federal budget and deal with illegal immigration. "I don't think that's any more complicated than reducing crime in New York.

"There's a total lack of experience on their side," he said of the Democratic field. "This is not a time for on-the-job training."

Giuliani said he wasn't taking the traditionally Republican state of Texas for granted even though Democrats believed they may have chance in the state because President Bush's support in polls has tumbled.

"That's why I'm here a lot," he said.

Giuliani: Medical Marijuana Unneccessary

Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said that people who want to legalize marijuana for medical purposes really just want to make the drug available to all.

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GIULIANI MONDAY SCHEDULE

Monday, July 23^rd:

WHAT:              Rudy Giuliani delivers remarks 

WHERE:           The Fairmont Hotel

                        950 Mason Street

                        San Francisco, CA

WHEN:              2:45 PM PT program begins

                        3:00 PM PT Rudy Giuliani speaks

Giuliani's Mayoral Record Is Complicated

  Rudy Giuliani boasts that he reined in crime, welfare and taxes in a city once considered ungovernable.

 

Those claims are intrinsic to the former New York mayor's pitch to Republican voters that he has the combination of competence and toughness they want in a president. Whether his record supports those claims, however, is a matter upon which admirers and critics differ markedly.

Most benchmarks during Giuliani's eight years as mayor, from the start of 1994 to Jan. 1, 2002, suggest dramatic success. The crime rate tumbled by 60 percent. Welfare rolls decreased by 52 percent. Taxes fell by at least 25 percent. While city spending grew, it lagged behind the booming economy of the 1990s.

His record, however, is more complicated than the numbers indicate.

Giuliani was a pugnacious leader. He picked fights with political foes as well as his own police chief and schools superintendent. Any critic -- squeegee men, artists, callers to his weekly radio show -- was fair game.

In his wake, Giuliani left a trail of detractors who insist he does not deserve all the credit for the good things that happened on his watch.

The city was primed for success as Giuliani took office in 1994.

Thousands of new police officers hired by his predecessor, Democrat David Dinkins, were coming on duty. Thousands of mentally ill homeless people were provided housing and treatment under a program begun by Dinkins and former Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo.

The economy was growing, pumping billions of dollars into the city treasury. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 3,754.09 on the day Giuliani arrived at City Hall and opened at 10,136.99 the day he left.

"He did some things in the first couple of years in particular that he should get some credit for, particularly the continuing reduction in crime, but I don't think he was an unusually good mayor," said Steven Cohen, a public affairs professor at Columbia University.

"He was actually a capable guy and did a good job," Cohen said. "But I think he had a tendency to see himself as the only person who was smart in the room."

Giuliani's signature issue, crime, is especially important to law-and-order Republican voters. Before winning the mayor's office, Giuliani was a federal prosecutor who put away drug pushers, mob figures and white-collar crooks.

Giuliani was mayor during a period of declining crime rates nationwide. Crime in New York peaked in 1990 and had been dropping for three years before Giuliani took office, according to FBI data. Nationally, violent crime declined 38 percent and property crime declined 33 percent from a modern peak in 1991 through 2005.

The drop was more dramatic in New York. Crime overall decreased by 60 percent between 1993, the year before Giuliani took office, and 2002, when he left. The national crime rate dropped by 24 percent during the same period.

The steep reductions in New York, Giuliani contends, came from a system developed by his police department to map crime patterns and make local police commanders responsible for reducing crime.

"New York City was the only one (of big cities) that had a decline in crime every single year" during that period, Giuliani told Iowa voters recently.

Other big cities copied New York's program -- Compstat, short for computerized, or compare, statistics. Giuliani wrote in his 2002 book, "Leadership," that he considered it his crown jewel.

But there was debate, even early on, over who deserved more credit for the drop in crime -- Giuliani or William Bratton, the charismatic police chief from 1994 to 1996. Giuliani abruptly fired Bratton after he appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the man responsible for the crime reduction.

Eli Silverman, a professor emeritus at City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, thinks Giuliani takes too much credit for the program. "He calls it the crown jewel of his leadership, the implication being it was his baby. There were other parents," Silverman said.

Today, Giuliani has defused the conflict by reconciling with Bratton, now the Los Angeles police chief, and making a point of mentioning Bratton and his aides in speeches.

Under Giuliani, police also cracked down on small-time "quality of life" offenders such as squeegee men and subway turnstile jumpers who often turned out to be responsible for more serious crimes.

Some experts say the new tactics -- combined with 12,000 more police officers hired under Dinkins and a merger with transit and housing police -- were instrumental in reducing crime.

"So more money was being put into policing, no question," said Silverman, who wrote a book on Compstat. "But money itself is not enough. You need not only more cops, but you need to allocate and deploy them more intelligently, and that's what Compstat was able to do."

Sociology professor Andrew Karmen, who also teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, does not think Compstat deserves as much credit. He cites other factors, such as an improved economy, an influx of immigrants who were generally law-abiding, a shrinking population of young people and more criminals serving jail time. Karmen also cited open admissions at New York City's public colleges, which provided an education to more young people.

Detractors also question whether police abused their power to achieve crime reductions, noting that civilian complaints against police rose 41 percent under Giuliani.

In two high-profile abuse cases, police shot and killed unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo, and Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was beaten and sodomized in a Brooklyn station house.

Officials from Giuliani's administration point out the city made it easier for people to file complaints. In "Leadership," Giuliani notes that police shootings declined -- from 81 in 1992 to 26 in 2002.

Giuliani expanded the Compstat approach throughout city government. For example, his administration applied it to job programs, measuring how many people were moved off welfare and into private sector jobs and reporting the numbers to the public.

Welfare rolls under Giuliani shrank by more than half, from more than 1 million to 516,000, according to city and federal records. Unemployment fell from 10 percent to 6 percent.

Giuliani helped tie public assistance to work, requiring people to work in community service jobs in exchange for welfare benefits. Giuliani renamed the city's welfare offices, calling them job centers.

Some welfare recipients, though, compared the community service jobs to indentured servitude and said they did not lead to real jobs.

Advocates for the poor point out that even though poverty rates fell under Giuliani, nearly one in five New Yorkers remained below the poverty line, well above the national rate.

Yet the rest of city residents saw fatter paychecks as the economy continued to expand. Personal income rose by an average of 5.8 percent annually while Giuliani was mayor, according to city and federal data.

Personal income is a good way to measure economic growth, said Chuck Brescher, research director of the independent Citizens Budget Commission.

By that and several other measures, city spending grew more slowly than the economy, at about 4.1 percent, according to the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that monitors New York City and New York state government.

At the same time, Giuliani cut taxes on commercial rent, personal and business income and general sales. The cuts grew steadily as the economy grew, from 0.2 percent in 1995 to 6.7 percent, or $1.6 billion, when he left office, CBC said.

For managing that in liberal New York, he gets good grades from the anti-tax group Club for Growth.

"He has his blemishes, but we thought his constructive policies in the face of such vigorous opposition was really noteworthy," said Pat Toomey, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who heads that group.

One way Giuliani kept spending in check was to cut city employees by an estimated 8 percent, not counting teachers.

Giuliani hired thousands more teachers, although the four-year high school graduation rate remained stubbornly unchanged at 52 percent during his tenure. Officials from Giuliani's administration point out Giuliani attempted to take control of the city school system, calling it "dysfunctional" and saying it should be "blown up."

As one of the top GOP contenders for the White House, Giuliani is drawing increased scrutiny for his mayoral record.

"The question is, how much does New York help him and how much does New York hurt him?" said Scott Huffman, political science professor at South Carolina's Winthrop University. "Remember, he's running in a Republican primary, and a lot of so-called red-staters don't have a fondness for that great city."

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Associated Press writer Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.

Poll: Giuliani, Clinton Take Lead in South Carolina

THE RACE: New Yorkers top polling in South Carolina, with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton leading both Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards with 43 percent among Democratic voters. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani leads Republicans with 30 percent.

THE NUMBERS - DEMOCRATS

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, 43 percent

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, 27 percent

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, 17 percent

No opinion, 9 percent

THE NUMBERS - REPUBLICAN

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, 30 percent

Arizona Sen. John McCain, 21 percent

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, 18 percent

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 6 percent

No opinion, 11 percent

OF INTEREST

Deep ties through her husband's presidency are helping Clinton, who has lagged Obama in building an organization in South Carolina. Obama had been expected to do well in South Carolina, where half of the early voting state's Democratic voters are black. Giuliani appears to have weathered the news of his former state chairman's federal indictment on a cocaine distribution charge. McCain appears to be holding his own despite national and state staff shake-ups.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. Poll was conducted by telephone July 16-18. The poll of 1,052 adults included 432 likely Republican primary voters and 380 likely Democratic primary voters. It has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Giuliani: More Ethanol, Nuclear Power

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani argued on Thursday that he can lead the country away from reliance on foreign oil with increases in ethanol production and nuclear power.

 

On a visit to Iowa, the leading ethanol-producing state, Giuliani called for more ethanol plants and new nuclear reactors, oil refineries, clean coal and transmission lines. He toured the Hawkeye Renewables plant in Fairbank, asked questions about the process and said ethanol "gives us hope for the future."

Giuliani held a private meeting with plant officials and workers after the tour.

Presidents dating to Richard Nixon have promised energy independence, "and we haven't made much of a real dent in getting there," Giuliani told a gathering Wednesday at restaurant in Le Mars.

"But we've got Brazil way ahead of us on ethanol," the former New York mayor said. "It doesn't make sense that Brazil, per capita, would be ahead of us on ethanol. We have a country like France that's 85 percent nuclear power. We haven't built a new nuclear plant in 30 years."

The United States produces and uses more gallons of ethanol fuel than Brazil -- a relatively recent development -- although Brazil remains the world's largest exporter. Ethanol is made from sugar in Brazil and from corn in the U.S., where government farm policy keeps sugar prices higher and limits supply.

"Every potential solution must be pursued -- from nuclear power to increased energy exploration to more aggressive investment in alternative energy sources," Giuliani said in a statement.

The ethanol industry is expanding rapidly in the United States. More than a quarter of the corn crop will go into ethanol this year in the United States, according to Agriculture Department estimates, up from 20 percent last year and 14 percent in 2005.

In Iowa, there are 28 ethanol refineries operating and 19 under construction or expanding, and there are 12 refineries for soybean-based biodiesel operating and three under construction, according to the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association.

Where a presidential candidate stands on ethanol use is a critical issue for White House contenders hoping to win Iowa's first-in-the-nation's caucuses, scheduled for Jan. 14.

Giuliani said he supports the 51-cent-a-gallon tax credit created by Congress to encourage growth of the ethanol industry: "I agree with subsidies for energy independence," he said. The tax credit expires in 2010.

Besides expanding nuclear power and renewable fuels like ethanol, Giuliani also called for more clean coal technologies, more clean-burning natural gas, environmentally safe drilling for oil and natural gas in North America and new technologies like hybrid cars and hydrogen fuel cells.

Giuliani has extensive ties to energy companies.

He leads all presidential candidates in contributions from donors and spouses of donors employed by the oil and gas industry. An analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics placed Giuliani's contributions from such donors at $396,000 through June 30, far ahead of the second highest oil and gas beneficiary, Mitt Romney.

Giuliani's law firm, Houston-based Bracewell & Giuliani, also has lobbied Texas legislators on behalf of Citgo Petroleum Corp., a Texas-based oil company ultimately controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Giuliani himself, however, did no lobbying for Citgo, which was a client of the law firm before Giuliani joined, Giuliani and Citgo officials have said.

The firm has worked on behalf of Saudi Arabia's oil ministry in a Texas court case. It's other legal clients include ChevronTexaco; BMB Munai, a developer of oil wells in Kazakhstan, and Statoil, a Norway-based oil and gas conglomerate.

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Associated Press Writer Amy Lorentzen in Fairbank, Iowa, contributed to this report.

Giuliani: No Abortion Litmus Test for Judges

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, a proponent of abortion rights, said Wednesday he would not use a judicial nominee's stand on the issue or the landmark Supreme Court decision as a litmus test.

 

On a campaign swing through conservative western Iowa, the former New York mayor pledged to appoint judges who would strictly interpret the Constitution on gun rights and other issues. Abortion never came up in his address to about 100 people at a high school, but it did during an exchange with reporters.

"Abortion is not a litmus test. Roe v. Wade is not a litmus test. No particular case is a litmus test. That's not the way to appoint Supreme Court justices or any judge," Giuliani said.

Roe v. Wade is the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion. Giuliani favors abortion rights though he has said he personally opposes the procedure, a stand that puts him at odds with his rivals and the conservative Republicans who hold sway in the primaries.

In talking to reporters, he said any candidate for federal judgeship would refuse to decide ahead of time on future abortion rulings.

"Otherwise, why have legal arguments if you're not going to give judges a chance to change their mind," Giuliani said.

He noted that he got no questions on abortion in his appearance. "I think Roe against Wade is an issue. It is not the only issue," he said.

At the first Republican debate in May, Giuliani was alone among the GOP candidates in offering a less-than-robust affirmation when asked whether it would be a good day if the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling.

"It would be OK," Giuliani said. "It would be OK to repeal it."

But, he added: "It would be OK also if a strict constructionist viewed it as precedent" and kept the law intact.

His promise about judicial appointments is aimed at reassuring conservatives nervous about his more liberal stands on gun control and other issues. As an example, he lauded a federal court ruling that overturned a 30-year-old ban on private ownership of handguns in Washington, D.C.

"The Second Amendment says people have a right to keep and bear arms. Judges interpret the Constitution; they should not be allowed to make it up," Giuliani said at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Council Bluffs.

He said he would appoint judges like Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two President Bush appointees who were embraced by conservatives for their views on abortion and other issues.

Giuliani mentioned former President Reagan more than half a dozen times, reminding the crowd about how he served as a senior Justice Department official during the Reagan administration.

"He did a very, very good job of, much more often than not, selecting really good judges who would interpret the Constitution in a way that will protect your rights and my rights," he said. "They're there to interpret things, not to change things. You have legislators to change things."

On Wednesday afternoon, Giuliani stopped at the Sloan Cafe in the farming town -- population slightly more than 1,000 -- to meet voters. About 200 people crowded the two-room cafe, and women stood on chairs to take photographs. Many said they were conservative, especially on abortion and gun control, but were willing to give Giuliani a chance.

Coleen Savage said it's difficult to support an abortion rights candidate, but Giuliani "can stand up against Hillary."

"To get the conservative, you've got to grit your teeth and take a little bit of the moderate or liberal," said Savage, a corn-and-soybean farmer.

Obama Girl Vs. Giuliani Girl

Web site barelypolitical.com has released a new political humor video. This time 'Obama Girl' is debating 'Giuliani Girl' in a 'Debate 08' skit.

WATCH THE VIDEO