It can’t be easy to be a conservative in Gray Davis’s
California. One would think that the recall election, which offers
the prospect of ejecting that widely disliked liberal technocrat
from office, would have improved the situation. Instead California
conservatives have a new dilemma: Whether to vote for Arnold
Schwarzenegger or Tom McClintock.
Schwarzenegger has money, a good organization and the high name
recognition that comes with celebrity. What he doesn’t have, even
after Bill Simon’s departure from the race, is a field clear of
other candidates splitting the Republican vote. The 12 percent
McClintock was drawing in a recent Los Angeles Times poll
would come in handy for Schwarzenegger in closing the gap with Lt.
Gov. Cruz Bustamante. McClintock, by contrast, has strong
conservative principles (and a state legislative voting record to
prove it) and is an expert on the state budget willing to
contemplate daring reforms. He is thus uniquely qualified to deal
with the issue that got the recall campaign going in the first
place, but the conventional wisdom is that he can only prevent a
Schwarzenegger victory, not win himself. It was expected that the
allure of pragmatism for victory-starved conservatives would grow
as the campaign progressed, drawing them into the Terminator’s
camp.
Yet the way the campaign has played out thus far appears only to
have increased many conservatives’ consternation. Peter Robinson,
author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, described the
situation well in an entry in NRO’s The Corner:
“For the past couple of weeks now, I’ve kept expecting the question
to resolve itself — all it would have taken would have been one or
two really impressive statements from Arnold or one or two really
foolish remarks by McClintock. But Der Arnold’s campaigning has
proven almost aggressively insipid, McClintock’s simply
brilliant.”
Case in point was last Wednesday’s candidate debate.
Schwarzenegger skipped it while McClintock attended and, according
to a plurality of respondents to one poll, won. The same poll found
that 55 percent of voters disapproved of Schwarzenegger’s decision
not to participate. So conservatives continue to wonder how they
should vote.
Allow me to muddy the waters further. I’m a conservative
Republican from Massachusetts, a red voter living in a
quintessentially blue state. I long ago reconciled myself to the
fact that a candidate who agrees with me 100 percent of the time,
if such a specimen can even be found in this liberal habitat, is
likely to have serious electability problems. I’m not opposed to
voting for moderate to liberal Republicans when necessary. But I’m
also mindful of the problems such Republicans can cause — liberal
Republicans can get away with things liberal Democrats often can’t
and their successes can drag the entire party to the left with
them. The key is whether they pass what I call the “Giuliani
test.”
Rudy Giuliani would have flunked almost any conservative litmus
test when he first ran for mayor of New York City. He was for gay
rights, gun control and abortion on demand, refusing even to
support a partial-birth abortion ban to placate the Conservative
Party while contemplating a run against Hillary Clinton for the
U.S. Senate in 2000. But he was conservative on the core issue of
crime and in office helped restore law and order to the
“ungovernable city.” In fact, on issues ranging from taxes to
welfare to the city budget, he ended up being as conservative as
was viable in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.
Thus, the Giuliani test doesn’t evaluate candidates based on how
conservative they are overall, but whether their election would
result in a shift to the right in an area where they could actually
make a difference. A Massachusetts example of a candidate who would
have passed the Giuliani test was Bill Weld in 1990. Weld was
ostentatiously liberal on social issues and lost the Republican
State Convention endorsement to pro-life state House GOP leader
Steve Pierce. But he was also a hard-line economic conservative,
willing to press for tax cuts, budgetary discipline and
privatization. After Weld beat Pierce in a surprise upset in the
primary, despite my initial misgivings this much was clear: No
matter who was elected governor, we were still going to have
abortion on demand in Massachusetts. But if the Democrats won —
even a relatively sensible Democrat like Weld’s opponent John
Silber — taxes were likely to go up, whereas under a Republican
governor there was at least the possibility they’d go down. So Bill
Weld it was.
During Weld’s first term, he was able to shift the political
debate on Beacon Hill from which taxes to raise to which budget
items to cut. The state’s business climate and bond ratings
improved as taxes were cut and the budget was balanced. He wasn’t
Ronald Reagan, but rightward progress was made.
Of course, the Giuliani test doesn’t give liberal Republicans a
free pass indefinitely. In my judgment, Weld no longer passed it by
the time he ran for the U.S. Senate against John Kerry in 1996. He
had gotten looser on spending, was increasingly pestering the
national party about abortion and even criticized Kerry’s vote to
confirm Clarence Thomas. I voted for a conservative third-party
candidate instead, although it didn’t affect the outcome of the
race. There are scenarios where Giuliani might not pass himself,
such as a presidential run. A Republican who will do more to move
the GOP to the left than move the jurisdiction they are running in
to the right fails my Giuliani test.
Essentially, John J. Miller’s National Review cover
story calling Arlen Specter the “worst Republican senator” is an
application of the Giuliani test. He acknowledges that Lincoln
Chafee actually has a more liberal voting record. But Specter is
deemed the worst because he is the most influential liberal
Republican senator, and thus the most effective at diluting the
Senate GOP conference’s conservatism.
Does Schwarzenegger pass? It’s hard to say. He has come out for
a state spending cap, against revisiting Proposition 13 and against
partial-birth abortion, gay marriage and issuing drivers’ licenses
to illegal immigrants. But he also has left the door open to tax
increases in an emergency, exempted education-related largesse from
spending cuts and could become the darling of those who believe the
GOP should jettison social conservatism if elected. Most recently,
he has even decided to choose a continuation of identity politics
over color-blindness by opposing Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy
Initiative.
Barring some clear, unequivocally conservative stand on an issue
of central importance to Californians before the campaign comes to
a close, Schwarzenegger does not appear to pass the Giuliani test.
If he fails that, then conservatives lose even if he wins.
