Romney’s life problem.

One of campaign 2008’s mysteries is Mitt Romney’s free ride from pro-lifers. His anti-abortion declarations are eloquent, as is everything the silver-tongued former Massachusetts governor utters. But, like most of his pronouncements, his rhetoric is at war with his record.

“Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion,” Romney said while challenging Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1994 reelection. Since then, Romney and his family decided “we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter.” Romney reaffirmed his pro-choice stance in his 2002 gubernatorial bid.

Romney contends he became pro-life in November 2004 after discussing embryonic stem-cells with Harvard researcher Douglas Melton. While U.S. embryos truly are Microscopic-Americans, a skeptic might question Romney’s statement that chatting with a biologist reversed his pro-choice position, rooted as it was in a loved one’s bloody death.

Romney’s metamorphosis would seem more sincere than convenient if his policies matched his perspective. Romney said last December 16 on Meet the Press: “Every piece of legislation which came to my desk in the coming years as a governor, I came down on the side of preserving the sanctity of life.” Nevertheless:

On July 25, 2005, Romney rejected a law that required medical centers to provide rape victims “morning after” emergency-contraception pills. The legislature overrode his veto. That December, the Public Health Department ruled that private hospitals with moral or religious objections could overlook the law. Romney then overturned that decision, as a top legal adviser recommended. “I have instructed the Department of Public Health to follow the conclusion of my own legal counsel and to adopt that sounder view,” Romney said December 8, 2005.

“Flip, flop, flip,” the Boston Herald opined the next day. “Yes, Gov. Mitt Romney has now executed an Olympic-caliber double flip-flop with a gold medal-performance twist-and-a-half on the issue of emergency contraception.”

“The appropriate response for Catholic hospitals is non-compliance,” the Catholic Action League’s C. J. Doyle told the Associated Press. “Otherwise, they would be compromising their religious integrity and Catholic identity.”

Romney signed an October 2005 measure to qualify some 88,000 low-income residents for family-planning services, including abortion counseling and “morning after” pills. “We have no objection to the Legislature’s directive that we seek a waiver to expand the eligible population to women with a slightly higher income,” Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom remarked.

Section 16M of Romney’s health-insurance mandate states, “There shall be a MassHealth payment policy advisory board” with 14 members of doctors’ and hospitals’ groups and “1 member appointed by Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts,” the state’s leading voice for abortion on demand and without apology.

“Romney did not object to Section 16M, even though he certainly could have,” Massachusetts Pro-Life Federation president Jerry Zandstra tells me. In fact, on April 12, 2006, he line-item-vetoed eight RomneyCare provisions, six of which the legislature overrode. While Romney vetoed broader Medicaid dental benefits, he neither rejected Planned Parenthood’s place at the table, nor insisted on including a pro-life representative. Romney and his wife attended a June 1994 Planned Parenthood fundraiser. Mrs. Romney gave the organization $150.

Romney signed this bill, although it did not prohibit subsidies of medically unnecessary abortions. A Massachusetts court ordered taxpayer funding of clinically vital, but not universal, abortions. Yet, RomneyCare unconditionally offers abortions for a $50 co-payment.

“The law exists under Romney’s signature, and the end result is state-funded abortions, guided by the butchering hands of Planned Parenthood,” says Zandstra. “The fact that he wouldn’t fight in Massachusetts does not bode well for what would happen if he occupies the Oval Office. It is exactly this kind of maneuvering that makes conservatives uncomfortable. In this key fight over taxpayer funded abortions, he caved. What would he do in the much bigger battles as president?”

MassDevelopment, an agency Romney’s appointees reportedly controlled, voted November 8, 2006 for a $5 million tax-exempt bond to build a 10,000-square-foot Planned Parenthood clinic in Worcester.

“He did not know about this loan,” Fehrnstrom said in last December 2’s Boston Globe. How strange. Ranch Kimball, Romney’s Economic Development secretary, chaired MassDevelopment. Romney could have opposed this bond until January 1, 2007, but did not.

Romney’s late-term anti-abortionism “was more than just a flip-flop,” said Planned Parenthood’s Angus McQuilken. “This was an extreme makeover.”

Just as Romney’s $983 million in higher levies and fees mock his assertion not to have raised taxes, abortion is yet another area where a grand canyon divides Romney’s words and deeds.

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New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

I have written repeatedly on Willard Mitt Romney’s serial flip-flops. Mitt is the born-again supply-sider who today swears he never raised taxes, even though he increased taxes and fees $983 million as Massachusetts governor. He is 2008’s stalwart defender of traditional values and man-woman marriage who, in 2002, distributed a hot-pink flyer among Boston’s gay community that read: “Mitt and Kerry Wish You A Great Pride Weekend! All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.” (Kerry Healey was the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor.) Romney is the Second Amendment enthusiast who brags about being a life-member of the National Rifle Association - “life” beginning in August 2006 - who said in 1994, “I don’t line up with the NRA.”

Pick nearly any topic, and you will find the new and old Romneys as far apart as two pugilists in opposite corners of a boxing ring, ready to knock each other’s lights out.

But nothing prepared me for Romney’s most amazing flip flop of all. Somehow, I missed it, despite months of researching his bipolar record.

During CNN’s January 30 debate from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Romney said, “one of the two great regrets I have in life is I didn’t serve in the military. I’d love to have.” This echoes what he told the Boston Globe last June 24. “I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

Now, as works with almost any subject, search Google or Nexis for “Romney” and “Vietnam” and any date before 2004, when he got serious about pursuing the 2008 GOP nomination.

Voila! There it is, from May 2, 1994. “I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam,” Romney told the Boston Herald.

This flip flop is much more revealing and far more disturbing than the rest.

It is bad enough to reverse course 180 degrees on public-policy matters such as taxes, gay rights, guns, abortion, immigration, the minimum wage, Ronald Reagan’s legacy, or any of the other topics on which the old and new Romneys clobber each other. At least these are political issues on which, at best, new information and thinking can justify changed views or, at worst, electoral mathematics can explain abandoning one position for another.

But for Romney to somersault on something so personal - his own non-involvement in the Vietnam War - makes one wonder if Romney is any different from an exterior set on a Hollywood back lot: Clean and pretty in the front and all flat, plywood planks in the back.

Today’s Romney says, more or less, “Too bad I was not part of a military quagmire that tragically cost the lives of 50,000 GIs.” Yesterday’s Romney said, more or less, “How fortunate I was not to be part of a military quagmire that tragically cost the lives of 50,000 GIs.”

Conveniently enough, today’s position plays well in a GOP primary filled with hawkish voters, and now led by the Vietnam War hero, Senator John McCain (R – Arizona). Romney’s 1994 comments more snugly suited Massachusetts - a liberal, Democrat-dominated state where such dovish remarks would have gone down well.

If Romney cynically shifted from his old position to his new one on Vietnam service, he is even more cold and calculating than previously thought.

And if he sincerely went from saying in 1994 that he had not desired to go to Vietnam to 2007’s longing to have been there, one wonders if there is anything at Romney’s core but breeze and tumbleweeds.

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New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

With Mike Huckabee down and Fred Thompson out in Florida, Tuesday’s Sunshine State primary promises a three-way brawl among Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Voters there, and beyond, should regard these three candidates like lamps in a traffic signal.

– Romney is the red light. The former Massachusetts governor’s tax-and-spend record should stop Republican voters in their tracks. Romney presents himself as a corporate super-mechanic who can lift the hood and make a stalled sedan NASCAR-ready. Too bad Romney left his state in the repair bay after four years of parts and labor.

Rather than reinvigorate Massachusetts with broad-based tax relief — as did his Republican gubernatorial predecessors, William Weld and Paul Cellucci — Romney launched a tax-hike binge reminiscent of Daddy Bush’s 1990 “read my lips” raid on America’s wallets.

Romney enacted 126 brand-new or increased fees, having requested 70, totaling $473 million. Thus, Massachusetts residents pay more for marriage licenses, gun registrations, blindness certificates, home-deed registries, power-meter inspections and even milk-dealer permits. Romney also signed 19 tax increases worth $519 million. Romney taxed gasoline, corporate trusts, nonprofit organizations, online software, sales catalogs, securities companies and more.

Romney also saddled Massachusetts with a government-run health-insurance scheme. Those who have ignored its individual-coverage mandate now face $219 in tax penalties, which could soar this year to $912. The Pacific Research Institute’s Sally Pipes calculates that RomneyCare cost taxpayers $619 million in 2007 — 31 percent above projections.

All this bought economic stasis. Manufacturing employment fell 14 percent under Romney, twice the national figure, ranking Massachusetts 48th among the states. As Romney left office, 124,100 fewer employees were working, versus February 2001, before Massachusetts entered recession. As Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom has admitted: “Did we recover all the jobs that were lost? No.”

– This race’s yellow light is McCain. Call him “Bob Dole 2.0″ — a beloved war hero and veteran Beltway insider with an uneven tax record. The Arizona senator voted to extend President Bush’s tax cuts and now wants them permanent. Yet, he rejected them in 2001 and 2003. According to Senate records, McCain cast 52 substantive and procedural votes for higher taxes. He backed Internet-access taxes, the “death tax,” a surtax on incomes above $1 million and $755.67 billion in tobacco taxes. He also spurned lower taxes on incomes and capital gains, and repeatedly voted to delay and shrivel other tax cuts.

On spending, however, McCain is delightfully parsimonious. He fought 2003’s $558 billion Medicare drug entitlement and is one of Congress’ loudest voices against extravagant, idiotic federal boondoggles.

– The green light is Giuliani. New York’s former mayor is a stalwart fiscal conservative who recently proposed America’s largest tax cut — ever.

As mayor, Giuliani pitched 64 tax cuts, and then charmed, scared or otherwise persuaded an overwhelmingly Democratic City Council to enact 23 of them totaling $9.8 billion. The top tax rate dropped 20.6 percent (vs. Romney’s 0 percent reduction). Also, the overall tax burden (tax revenue’s share of personal income) fell 17.1 percent under Giuliani, while it rose 10.8 percent under Romney.

On Giuliani’s watch, real, per-capita spending declined 0.9 percent. He shrank Gotham’s government and produced a $2.9 billion budget surplus, largely through spending reductions and higher revenues generated by accelerated economic growth that his tax cuts triggered.

Likewise, Giuliani unleashed an employment machine. He helped private-sector payrolls soar 15.2 percent (vs. Romney’s 0.5 percent) — great news for 411,600 job seekers. Moving 58 percent of public-assistance recipients from welfare to work also benefited taxpayers. More important, this strengthened the character of the 643,348 people who underwent this transformation.

Giuliani’s proposed optional, one-page tax return collapses today’s six rates (up to 35 percent) into three: 10 percent, 15 percent and 30 percent. This significantly would lower everyone’s taxes. A family of four earning $80,000 would enjoy a 24 percent tax cut of $2,207. Single Americans making $35,000 would save 13 percent on their taxes.

Giuliani also would index and eventually excise the alternative minimum tax and electrify the economy by chopping corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent, and capital gains taxes from 15 percent to 10 percent.

How swiftly will America travel the road ahead? GOP voters will help decide — by lighting that path red, yellow or green.

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New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

As political strategists decamped for Michigan and points south, many here wondered how Willard Mitt Romney could lose 2008’s first primary to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., 32 to 37 percent, respectively, despite Romney’s four years as governor of contiguous Massachusetts and some $15.5 million in reported campaign expenditures. Granite State Republicans, previously keen on Romney, likely soured on his legacy as a tax hiker who increased levies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Boston newspapers informed their New Hampshire readers of Romney’s rising-tax tide.

“Tax rates on many corporations almost doubled because of legislation supported by Romney,” Boston Science Corporation chairman Peter Nicholas wrote in the Jan. 6 Boston Herald. Romney boosted taxes on subchapter S corporations owned by business trusts from 5.3 percent to 9.8 percent, a four-fifths increase. Nicholas called this “an important disincentive to investment, growth and job creation.”

“Corporate taxes went up $210 million under Romney,” the Herald editorialized. “And we wonder why companies look north, south, east and west, anywhere but Massachusetts, to expand?”

“Imposing business tax increases is wrong for the people of Massachusetts,” Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce CEO Paul Guzzi complained to State House News Service last year: “We’re down 140,000 jobs since 2001.”

While Romney sped a $275 million capital-gains tax rebate, scored property-tax relief for seniors and secured a two-day, tax-free shopping holiday, he imposed $283 million in business “loophole closures” and $501.5 million in increased fees on marriage licenses, gun registrations, gasoline deliveries, real-estate transfers, and more. Under Romney, the Tax Foundation calculated, Massachusetts fell from America’s 29th most business-friendly state to No. 36.

Romney’s sledding became even tougher when Republicans here learned that his 2003 and 2004 tax legislation covered those who work, conduct business, and/or invest in Massachusetts, but live elsewhere. According to figures the Massachusetts Department of Revenue provided, between 2003 and 2006, such New Hampshirites shipped Massachusetts $95 million above what they paid when Romney arrived. The average check from such a Granite State commuter grew 19.2 percent under Romney.
This bad tax news helped push Romney into McCain’s shadow.

Romney’s worrisome tax record now faces a fresh challenge from his rival, Rudolph W. Giuliani. New York’s former mayor flew to Florida Wednesday to unveil what Club for Growth (CFG) president Pat Toomey calls “a supply-sider’s dream.”

Giuliani proposes that Americans could file an optional, 11-line, one-page Fair and Simple Tax (FAST) form. They would enjoy mortgage-interest, charity, and state/local tax deductions, a $3,500 personal exemption, a $1,000-per-child credit, and a new health-insurance exclusion of $15,000 for families and $7,500 for individuals.

More dramatic, today’s six brackets, reaching 35 percent, would become three: 10, 15 and 30 percent. A family of four earning $80,000 would save $2,207 or 24 percent in taxes. At $120,000, they would save $7,014, or 36 percent.

Americans who cherish today’s 67,204-page tax code could keep it. Others could volunteer for the FAST tax. “Your Money. Your Choice,” as Giuliani’s slogan goes.

Giuliani would index the alternative minimum tax to inflation, and eventually scrap it. He would bury the death tax. Corporate taxes, higher only in Japan, would fall from 35 to 25 percent. Capital-gains and dividend taxes would tumble from 15 to 10 percent. President Bush’s tax reductions would become permanent.

“This tax cut — the largest in history — would represent a monumental leap forward for the American taxpayer and the U.S. economy,” says Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist.

“Giuliani understands that the way to create more economic growth is to lower the burden and inefficiency inherent in the current system, much as he did in New York,” says CFG’s Toomey. “Economic conservatives should be very excited by this bold, new tax-cutting plan.”

“Every Republican that I can see in this race is promising to lower taxes,” Giuliani told journalists here on primary eve. “But here is the difference: I am the only one who actually has done it — big time.” Giuliani reduced Gotham’s tax burden 19 percent, totaling $9.8 billion.

For his part, Romney wants taxes “simpler, and flatter and lower,” but offers few specifics.

With plenty on their minds already, Republicans now can weigh Romney’s sad, statist record on taxes against Giuliani’s audacious, hopeful tax agenda.
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Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Soon after becoming Massachusetts governor, Willard Mitt Romney retroactively imposed new taxes on non-residents, including Granite State citizens who work, conduct business, and/or invest in the Bay State. Romney’s higher taxes reached into New Hampshire and helped vacuum at least $95 million in marginal income back across the border.

According to Massachusetts Department of Revenue figures, the total amount that New Hampshire taxpayers surrendered to Massachusetts grew from $213.6 million in 2002 to $248.9 million in 2006, a 16.5 percent increase. (Data for 2006 are preliminary.)

Had 2002’s tax baseline remained flat, New Hampshire taxpayers would have kept $95 million in cumulative payments to Massachusetts since 2003. Higher revenues often are a supply-side effect of tax cuts. This is not so when taxes increase.

Massachusetts tax revenues from New Hampshire residents increased even as the number of New Hampshire residents who paid Massachusetts taxes fell 2.3 percent — from 89,304 in 2002 to 87,320 in 2006. The checks shrank in number, but swelled in value. The average tax payment from New Hampshire expanded $458 — from $2,392 in 2002 to $2,850 in 2006 — up 19.2 percent.

“That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the number of New Hampshire taxpayers who pay (as opposed to simply file) didn’t change in what appears to be any statistically significant way during this period, yet the average tax payment went up substantially,” says Cato Institute scholar Stephen Slivinski.

These higher payments perfectly coincide with legislation Romney signed on March 5, 2003, retroactive to that Jan. 1. Under Romney’s law, “gross income derived from. . . any trade or business, including any employment,” would be taxable, “regardless of the taxpayer’s residence or domicile in the year it is received.”

These rules now cover “gain from the sale of a business or of an interest in a business, distributive share income, separation, sick or vacation pay, deferred compensation and [state-taxable] nonqualified pension income.” On Aug. 9, 2004 Romney also taxed non-residents’ shares of income from real-estate partnerships.

“Romney created these taxes new,” says Robert Roughsedge, a Hampton attorney who works in Boston. “He taxed more people and companies than before. This is what a dying state must do to keep the tax base. This is not a pro-growth, Reagan-type answer to the problem. . . . Romney chose to tax the people who left, increase the people outside of the state subject to taxation, and probably remove the incentive to leave by increasing the cost.”

“This research confirms what I said when Mitt Romney started attacking Rudy Giuliani on the commuter-tax issue in New York,” says former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci, who supports Giuliani.

“That was an existing tax. Mayor Giuliani had other priorities in terms of tax cutting. He provided broad-based tax relief for New York residents and businesses, something Mitt Romney could not do in Massachusetts. It’s ironic that Mayor Giuliani did not raise taxes on commuters, yet he gets criticized by a guy who did raise taxes on commuters, in particular people in New Hampshire who work in Massachusetts.”

Had Romney’s spokesmen commented, as requested, they might have observed that he sped a $275 million capital gains tax rebate, scored property-tax relief for seniors and secured a two-day, tax-free shopping holiday.

Nonetheless, Merrimack’s Bob Bevill, chairman of the conservative New Hampshire Eagle Forum, is among those who condemn Romney for $283 million in business “loophole closures” and $501.5 million in increased fees on marriage licenses, gun registrations, gasoline deliveries, property-deed certificates, and more.

“New Hampshire taxpayers should be concerned that Mr. Romney will continue his semantically challenged shell-game of raising taxes, through increased users fees and special tariffs, while publicly stating that he has not raised taxes,” Bevill says. “A vote for Romney is a vote for higher taxes — no matter what they are called.”

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New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

As if it were an act of Christmas entertainment, America’s so-called “Paper of Record” recently unveiled its latest act of Lance-Armstrong-in-reverse back-peddling.

After much gloating and chest beating, it has taken a closer look at the charge that Mayor Giuliani cooked the books to cover NYPD security costs related to his personal travels. Well, all this turns out to be much ado about next to nothing.

As that paper, whose very name I am loathe to repeat, reported December 20:

“…the records reviewed so far, which account for 93 percent of the mayoral travel expenses for that period, suggest that Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to see Ms. Nathan, who is now his wife, had nothing to do with any accounting legerdemain.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration is reviewing the remaining 7 percent of relevant records from Mayor Giuliani’s tenure. So far, however, the supposed shifting of funds, financial cover-ups, and other culinary accounting that were alleged never actually happened.

Once again, this paper has lived up to its motto: “All the News That’s Fit to Print” — specifically at the bottom of page A-35 on the Friday before Christmas weekend.

The exculpatory details are here, on the record, albeit far from the blaring headlines that originally accompanied this now seemingly baseless flap.

Just look at the numbers.

Ramesh Ponnuru responded Friday to my piece on Rudolph W. Giuliani and the Religious Right by accusing me of performing “spin for the mayor.” My dreidel impersonation, Ramesh wrote, includes “cherry-picking” data to advance my arguments.

It hardly is “cherry-picking” to analyze Giuliani’s abortion record by documenting the decreases during his tenure in New York City’s total abortions, its abortion ratio (abortions per 1,000 live births), local-taxpayer-financed Medicaid abortions, and local-Medicaid-abortion spending. I suppose it also would be “cherry-picking” to invoke GDP growth, the unemployment rate, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and rising tax revenues to prove that President Bush’s tax cuts are working.

Ramesh complained that I failed to tell readers that abortions “remained extremely high…”

Yes, abortions remained extremely high in New York City, a liberal metropolis that some have dubbed America’s abortion capitol. In this environment, it is incredibly unfair to flog Giuliani because abortions dropped “just” 17 percent on his watch, while America managed only a 13 percent simultaneous decline in abortions. Even more impressive, Medicaid abortions tumbled 23 percent. (Because the 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibits nearly all federal abortion spending, no equivalent federal datum exists.) So, apparently scorn is the appropriate reaction to a nearly one-quarter cut in taxpayer-funded abortions.

Damn you, Rudy! Why didn’t you slash Medicaid abortions by 50 percent?

What’s important is that these numbers not only did not rise; they fell significantly, and much more than they did nationally. If Rudy really were the pom-pom-waving abortion monger his critics claim he is (”Gotham, Gotham, Sis-Boom-Bah…Get an abortion, Rah-Rah-Rah!”), abortions should have increased during his term, or at least not slid more quickly than they did from sea to shining sea.

Ramesh also posited that I did not mention that under Giuliani, abortions in New York City “declined less than the statewide average.”

Here are the facts: Between 1993 and 2001, abortions waned 26.9 percent in New York State, excluding the five boroughs; 20.1 percent in New York State overall (including Gotham); and 16.9 percent in New York City.

Giuliani was mayor of New York City, not governor of New York State. Thus, he should be judged according to data relevant to his jurisdiction. Still, these figures are no surprise. Syracuse tends to be more socially conservative than the socially liberal South Bronx. Upstate abortion figures naturally reflect a generally more pro-life culture north of Yonkers, just as Illinois’ incidence of abortion most likely decreases the further one drives south of Chicago.

That said, between 1993 and 2001, taxpayer-funded Medicaid abortions in upstate New York slipped 21.7 percent, slid 22.6 percent statewide, and sank 22.9 percent in New York City. So, when it came to government-subsidized abortions, Gotham was more pro-life during Giuliani Time than was the rest of the Empire State.

Speaking of cherry-picking, Ramesh scoured the website of Social Conservatives for Rudy (which I cited), located its list of Rudy-friendly public officials, selected Rep. Judy Biggert (R., Ill.), then highlighted a few of her anti-life votes, presumably to associate Giuliani with several dreadful public policies. This is like picking one cherry from atop a tree, peeling it, and triumphantly waving its pit in the air.

Without such acrobatics, here are a dozen members of Congress who have endorsed Giuliani, not just praised him, along with their National Right to Life Committee ratings for the 109th Congress:

Rep. Charles Boustany (R., La.) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Phil English (R., Pa.) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R., N.J.) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Candice Miller (R., Mich.) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. George Radanovich (R., Calif.) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Jim Walsh (R-NY) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) - NRLC rating: 100 percent

Among Giuliani’s nine other congressional endorsers, five enjoy 82 ratings, three range between 70 and 44, while one (Biggert) earns a mere 9. However, Rudy’s congressional team averages an 84 NRLC rating. This is not a bad collective score for those on Capitol Hill who support a man smeared by his adversaries as “Mr. Abortion.” (For details click here.)

These members of Congress grasp what seems to escape Ramesh and other Rudy foes: Giuliani is no social liberal. The impressive abortion reductions during his mayoralty should be counted among the socially conservative advances that Giuliani either engineered or witnessed on his watch. (Adoption hikes, crime cuts, welfare reform, charter schools, and racial-quota elimination were among many others he enacted.) Were Giuliani as energetically pro-choice as his detractors claim, he would have presided over smaller - or even nonexistent - declines in abortion.

Finally, independent of Ramesh Ponnuru’s comments, any third-party bid by pro-lifers if Giuliani were nominated almost certainly would catapult today’s Democratic frontrunner into the Oval Office. That would empower Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton to pursue a proudly pro-abortion agenda, which would increase, not decrease, the number of fetuses killed in America. If that, bafflingly, is what some Religious Right activists would consider a pro-life triumph, the sun rises in the west, Niagara Falls flows upstream, and I have long, blond hair.

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This article was originally published in the National Review Online on October 15th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has accused fellow GOP presidential contender Rudolph Giuliani of operating a “sanctuary city” while New York mayor. Presumably, Giuliani waved illegal aliens into Gotham, like a third-base coach urging runners home ahead of a mighty outfielder’s throw. In fact, Giuliani was tougher on illegal immigrants than Romney claims. Conversely, Romney was easier on illegals than his current hard-line posture suggests.

In last month’s CNN/YouTube debate, Romney quoted Giuliani:

“If you come here, and you work hard, and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people that we want in this city.” Romney conveniently omitted this sentence from Giuliani’s June 1994 press-conference remarks:

“And if you’re somebody who comes here, and you want to violate the drug laws, the laws against violence, the laws to protect us in other ways, then I’d like to see you apprehended and put in prison and then sent back to where you came from.”

Among New York’s 400,000 illegals, the feds deported 776 in 1994. With the Clinton administration spurning expulsions, Giuliani did the best he could.

Giuliani maintained city policies that let illegal aliens report crimes without risking ejection. With 1,946 homicides and 600,346 serious crimes the year he was elected, Giuliani wanted illegals to identify criminals. They similarly could receive emergency medicine, rather than remain untreated, possibly sickening others. Illegals also could send their children to public schools, rather than have 70,000 kids roaming the streets, attracting criminals, and possibly committing violations themselves.

Giuliani’s anti-crime campaign otherwise targeted illegal-alien offenders.

“We’d like to see a situation in which we can put ‘em on a plane and charge INS for the ticket,” Katie Lapp, Giuliani’s criminal-justice coordinator, told Newsday in November 1994. “It’s the mayor’s position that INS should increase border patrols and keep these people out of the country in the first place.”

The INS never approved what Newsday dubbed “Air Giuliani.” In April 1994, however, Giuliani restored alerts to the INS whenever police arrested illegal-alien criminal suspects. In January 1993, the INS claimed it lacked resources to pursue such reports and asked Democratic Mayor David Dinkins to stop making them.

In contrast, Romney waited until 18 days before leaving office to secure federal permission for state troopers to arrest illegal aliens. Actually, this program never commenced. As promised, Romney’s Democratic successor, Gov. Deval Patrick, scrapped it before troopers began relevant training.

Romney’s immigration record was ho-hum long before this 11th-hour initiative. Beyond opposing driver’s licenses and in-state college tuition for illegals, Romney’s failures helped keep Massachusetts attractive to them.

It may be a private matter that illegal aliens raked Romney’s lawn as recently as Nov. 29. But Romney’s administration should have scrutinized state employees more carefully. Among nine Massachusetts public-works sites examined in the June 18, 2006, Boston Globe, 38 percent of weekly wage-earners lacked valid Social Security numbers. At one university masonry project, 55 of the contractor’s 87 workers had dodgy Social Security numbers. Some belonged to dead people. One jail-construction worker offered this unusual Social Security number: 666-66-6666.

“The governor is not surprised that our current immigration laws are a mess,” Romney’s gubernatorial spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, shrugged.

Meanwhile, Romney let Brewster, Brookline, Cambridge, Lexington, Orleans, and Somerville openly flout federal immigration laws.

“I’m not going to break the trust we have built up with the immigrant community to enforce the misguided policies of the federal government,” Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone said in the July 6 Somerville News.

Romney could have pressured or sued these six sanctuary cities to become non-sanctuaries. He also could have slashed their allowances. Instead, state tax dollars cascaded into their coffers.

Romney’s proposed assistance to these locales grew from $103,218,421 in fiscal year 2004 to $107,419,246 in fiscal year 2007 — up 4.1 percent.

Did Romney challenge these sanctuary cities?

“Absolutely not,” Cambridge mayoral spokesman John Clifford told the American Spectator’s Philip Klein. Clifford laughed: “He never took on Cambridge, except out of state.”

“Romney’s being a hypocrite on this issue,” Curtatone told ABC News. “I did not receive a mandate, any communication, anything at all from him about this. If it’s so important to him, why didn’t he have the state police enforcing it?”

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New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Mitt’s messy crime record.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney suddenly faces questions about bicoastal tragedies involving three murder victims, a vicious killer, and a permissive judge he appointed who helped magnify this mayhem.

Daniel Tavares Jr., 41, pleaded guilty in 1991 to stabbing his mother fatally with a carving knife in their Somerset, Massachusetts home. While serving a 17 – 20-year sentence for that atrocity, Tavares allegedly punched one prison guard in the head and later spat on another while yelling “I’m going to kill you!” According to a Department of Corrections document cited by the Boston Herald, Tavares also “threatened to kill the governor [Romney], attorney general of MA, Bristol County Sheriff, and other law enforcement officials when released.” Nonetheless, he was freed last June 14 after just 16 years, thanks to “good time.”

Police immediately re-arrested Tavares to prosecute him for his alleged assaults on these corrections officers. But Kathe Tuttman, a Romney-nominated superior-court judge, rejected both a lower-court decision and prosecutors’ requests to hold Tavares on $50,000 bail. On appeal, Tuttman overlooked Tavares’s prison antics, as well as his eight prior drug and robbery busts. She released him on his own recognizance on July 16. Tuttman also spurned prosecutors’ wishes that Tavares wear a monitoring bracelet. “There is no indication,” she ruled, “that he is a risk of flight.” Tuttman ordered Tavares to report to a probation officer thrice weekly, work as a welder at Davon Steel, and move in with his sister in Dighton, Massachusetts.

Instead, Tavares skipped town, went west, and married Jennifer Lynn Freitas, 37, a woman he met on inmate.com with whom he corresponded while incarcerated. They lived in a trailer near Graham, Wash., some 40 miles south of Seattle.

On November 17, Tavares allegedly argued with two neighbors, Beverly Mauck, 28, and Brian Mauck, 30, a young couple who liked scuba diving and married in the Turks and Caicos Islands on May 5, 2006. Police say Tavares wrapped a .22-caliber revolver in a towel, kicked in the Mucks’ door, and then fatally shot each of them three times in the head. Detectives say they matched Tavares to a bloody palm print and shoe prints found in the Maucks’ home. According to police, Tavares confessed to these crimes.

“It’s because of stupidity in Massachusetts that my daughter is dead,” Beverly Mauck’s father, Darrel Slater, told the Herald. “How does a guy who killed his mother, get charged with more crimes, get out of jail? How can he leave the state?”

Romney stepped into this controversy Saturday.

Judge Tuttman’s decision ‘‘showed an inexplicable lack of good judgment in a hearing that decided to put someone on the street who had not only in the past been convicted of manslaughter, but had threatened the lives of other individuals and was a flight risk,” Romney told journalists while campaigning in Derry, N.H. ‘‘And I think on that basis, that despite her record as being a law-and-order prosecutor, her lack of judgment suggests that she needs to resign from that post.”

When Romney appointed Tuttman, however, he seemed more focused on gender issues than on law and order. Tuttman was one of four associate justices nominated in April 2006 - all women.

All four had prosecutorial experience. In fact, Tuttman, a registered Democrat, was an Essex County assistant district attorney who, among others, prosecuted Eugene McCollom. He pleaded guilty in 2005 to decapitating a prostitute and burying her on a beach in Nahant, Mass. Nonetheless, contemporaneous news accounts show that as it unveiled these judicial appointees, the Romney administration seemed singularly enthused about how these nominees helped it celebrate diversity.

Romney made “a concerted effort to find qualified women and minority candidates for the bench,” spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told the State House News Service on April 26, 2006. “For a long time, women and minorities didn’t even bother applying for judgeships because of the perception that the whole process was politically wired.” Fehrnstrom reportedly suggested that although none of these four women was a minority member, people should “stay tuned” for Romney to name judges of color. “The governor is interested in making sure that appointments to the bench, to the extent possible, reflect the diversity of the community at large,” Fehrnstrom said to the Boston Globe.

How might New Hampshire voters regard this development in their next-door neighbor’s presidential bid? Some may see this as further evidence that “Laxachusetts”’s leniency jeopardizes their safety. In a November 14, 2006, editorial, the New Hampshire Union-Leader complained: “When thugs commit crimes in Massachusetts, too often it is New Hampshire that gets punished.” The paper explained that “Massachusetts enters only about 5 percent of its outstanding warrants into the [FBI's National Crime Information Center] database.” Consequently, 95 percent of criminals wanted in Massachusetts appear law-abiding when New Hampshire cops stop them and compare their names against this database. Romney proposed a bill to require state and local cops to report such warrants to the FBI, but failed to get it through his state legislature.

“People tragically have been killed over this,” Stephen Monier, New Hampshire’s U.S. Marshall told the Union-Leader. “It’s a huge issue.”

Former Democratic state senator Jarrett Barrios told the Herald, “Had he [Romney] actually followed our recommendations on appropriate programs for re-entering prisoners, not just this prisoner, but prisoners across the commonwealth, would be less likely to reoffend.” Barrios also accused Romney of ignoring his own blue-ribbon panel on penal reform. Among other things, it advised post-release monitoring of inmates and job training as methods to reduce recidivism.

Romney’s chief Republican rival, former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, took this occasion to examine Romney’s crime record more broadly.

‘‘The governor is going to have to explain his appointment, and the judge is going to have to explain her decision, but it’s not an isolated situation,” Giuliani told the Associated Press Saturday while on a campaign bus tour across New Hampshire. ‘‘Governor Romney did not have a good record in dealing with violent crime.”

“He had an increase in murder and violent crime while he was governor,” Giuliani continued. ‘‘So it’s not so much the isolated situation which he and the judge will have to explain. He’s kind of thrown her under the bus, so it’s hard to know how this is all going to come out. But the reality is, he did not have a record of reducing violent crime.”

While it’s tricky to compare a four-year governorship with an eight-year mayoralty, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics illuminate Romney’s and Giuliani’s records on law and order. While murders grew 7.5 percent in Massachusetts during Romney’s 2002 - 2006 gubernatorial term, they plunged 66.7 percent across Giuliani’s two mayoral terms (1993 – 2001). Burglaries rose 5.8 percent under Romney and slid 68.2 percent under Giuliani. While robberies climbed 12.3 percent on Romney’s watch, Giuliani supervised a 67.2 percent reduction in robberies. As Romney saw a 32.5 percent reversal in motor-vehicle theft, such crimes cratered 73.3 percent under Giuliani. Overall, Romney’s crime index fell 8.2 percent, while Giuliani’s tumbled 56.1 percent.

(For additional details click here.)

This ghastly episode’s most telling comment comes from the pen of the suspect behind this grisly double homicide, now isolated in Washington’s Pierce County Jail. As the Herald reported November 21, Daniel Tavares Jr. wrote his father to say he received a college education and learned seven languages behind bars. As this convicted killer added: “Only in Massachusetts.”

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This article was originally published in the National Review Online on November 26th, 2007.

Third-party talk ignores Giuliani’s record.

“The most important ‘traditional value’ in this election is keeping the Clintons out of the White House,” says Greg Alterton, an evangelical Christian who has “spent my entire professional career considering how my faith impacts, or should impact, the arena in which I work” - government and politics. Alterton writes for SoConsForRudy.com and counts himself among Rudolph W. Giuliani’s social-conservative supporters.

People like Alterton are important, if overlooked, in the Republican presidential sweepstakes. Anti-Giuliani Religious Rightists are far more visible. Also conspicuous are pundits whose cartoon version of social conservatism regards abortion and gay rights as “the social issues,” excluding other traditionalist concerns.

New York’s former mayor “has abandoned social conservatism,” commentator Maggie Gallagher complains. He “is anathema to social conservatives,” veteran columnist Robert Novak recently wrote. Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson has said: “I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008. It is an irrevocable decision.” Dobson and a cadre of Religious Right leaders threaten to deploy a pro-life, third-party candidate should Giuliani be nominated.

This “Rudyphobia” ignores three key factors: Giuliani’s pro-family/anti-abortion ideas, his socially conservative mayoral record, and his popularity among churchgoing Republicans.

While Giuliani accepts a woman’s right to an abortion, he told Iowa voters on August 7: “By working together to promote personal responsibility and a culture of life, Americans can limit abortions and increase adoptions.” Among Giuliani’s proposals to achieve this end:

“My administration will streamline the adoption process by removing the heartbreaking bureaucratic delays that burden the current process.” Giuliani notes that sclerotic court schedules, exhausted social workers, and tangled red tape trap some 115,000 boys and girls in foster care and prevent moms and dads from adopting them.

Giuliani proposes that the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives promote organizations that help women choose adoption over abortion.

He would make permanent the $10,000 adoption tax credit.

Giuliani also would encourage states and cities to report timely and complete statistics to measure progress in abortion reduction.

This is no sudden conversion on the road to Washington. As mayor, Giuliani did nothing to advance abortion. That helps explains why, on his watch, total abortions fell 13 percent across America, but slid 17 percent in New York. More significant, between 1993 and 2001, Gotham’s tax-funded Medicaid abortions plunged 23 percent.

Medicaid reimbursement figures from the New York State Division of the Budget allow a rough calculation of the Giuliani administration’s expenditures on taxpayer-financed abortions. This estimated funding dropped 22.85 percent, from $1,226,414 in 1993 to $946,175 in 2001. (See more here.)

Giuliani’s campaign for personal responsibility helped create a climate that discouraged abortion. Moving 58 percent of welfare recipients from public assistance to self-reliance, starting before President Clinton signed federal welfare reform, may have encouraged women and men to avoid unwanted pregnancies. New York’s transformation from chaos to order - which helped slash overall crime by 57 percent and homicide by 67 percent - probably reinforced such self-control.

Compared to the eight Democratic years before he arrived, adoptions under Giuliani soared 133 percent. Fiscal years 1987 to 1994 saw 11,287 adoptions; this grew to 27,561 between FY 1995 and FY 2002.

In another pro-family policy, Giuliani divested 78 percent of City Hall’s vast portfolio of confiscated, property-tax-delinquent homes. These were privatized and sold to families and individuals.

Giuliani proposed eliminating the city’s $2,000 marriage penalty. (As individuals, a husband and wife each would enjoy a $7,500 standard deduction, but only write off $13,000 if they jointly filed taxes.) He chopped it to just $400, letting joint-filers share a $14,600 deduction.

Giuliani also opposed gay marriage in 1989, long before it shot onto the radar. “My definition of family is what it is,” Giuliani told Newsday 18 years ago. “It does not include gay marriage as part of that definition.”

On Day 24 of his mayoralty, Giuliani jettisoned New York’s minority and women-owned business set-aside program. He later explained: “The whole idea of quotas to me perpetuates discrimination.” During the 12-year “Republican Revolution,” Congress deserted the fight for colorblindness.

Giuliani sliced or scrapped 23 taxes totaling $9.8 billion and shrank Gotham’s tax burden by 17 percent. This left parents more money for children’s healthcare, private-school tuition, etc.

On education, Giuliani launched a $10 million fund to support 17 new charter schools. Zero existed before he arrived. Giuliani also ended tenure for principals, fought for vouchers, and torpedoed City University’s open admissions and social-promotion policies.

“I took a city that was also known as the pornography capitol of this country,” Giuliani told New Hampshire voters last June. “I got through a ground-breaking re-zoning that was challenged in the courts. We won. And now, if you go to New York City, you don’t have to be bombarded with pornography. And the city has grown dramatically - economically, physically, and spiritually.”

Giuliani accomplished this and plenty more - not in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but in New York City. He could have governed comfortably as a pro-abortion, pro-welfare, pro-quota, soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend, liberal Republican. Instead, Giuliani relentlessly pushed Reaganesque socio-economic reforms through a City Council populated by seven Republicans and 44 Democrats. What’s so liberal about that?

This record, and Giuliani’s headstrong style, may explain why he leads his competitors and impresses churchgoers. An October 3 ABC/Washington Post poll of 398 Republican and GOP-leaning adults found Giuliani outrunning former senator Fred Thompson, 34 percent to 17, versus Senator John McCain’s 12 percent, and Willard Mitt Romney’s 11. (Error margin +/- 5 percent.) As “most electable,” Giuliani took 50 percent, versus McCain’s 15, Thompson’s 13, and Romney’s 6.

An October 3 Gallup survey found Giuliani enjoying a 38 percent net-favorable rating among churchgoing Catholics, compared to McCain’s 29, and Thompson’s 25. Among Protestant churchgoers, Thompson edges Giuliani 26 percent to 23, with McCain at 16, and Romney at 7.

What do Giuliani’s Religious Right detractors really fear he will do about abortion? If he can overcome their suspicions, secure the GOP nomination, and win the White House, do Giuliani’s critics actually believe he would squander that victory and enrage the GOP base by pushing abortion? Do his foes honestly think Giuliani would request federal abortion funding in violation of the Hyde Amendment he says he supports or appoint activist Supreme Court justices, rather than Antonin Scalia- and Clarence Thomas-style constitutionalists, as he says he would?

Having kept or exceeded his mayoral promises on taxes, spending, crime, welfare, and quality of life, why would he break his presidential promises on such a signature GOP issue? What kind of bait and switch do Giuliani’s foes truly worry he will attempt?

The contrast between Giuliani and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, could not be sharper. She would appoint pro-abortion justices and lower-court judges. These jurists also would be softer on crime, racial preferences, unions, and eminent-domain abuse than Giuliani’s would be.

Hillary Clinton also would take President Bush’s embryonic stem-cell program and expand it in every direction. If Giuliani does not padlock it, he at least would be more sympathetic than Clinton to privatizing it. If America must banish embryos to Petri dishes, let Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer do this. It is inconceivable that Hillary Clinton would shift anything from Washington to the private sector, especially America’s “greedy, wicked” pharmaceutical companies.

Religious Right leaders should study Giuliani’s entire socially conservative record, not just the “socially liberal” caricature of it that hostile commentators and lazy journalists keep sketching. Giuliani’s October 20 appearance before the Family Research Council will permit exactly that. Also, while Giuliani may not be their dream contender, social conservatives should not make the perfect the enemy of the outstanding. Ultimately, they should recognize that a pro-life, third-party candidate would subtract votes from Giuliani in November 2008.

That would raise the curtain on a 3-D horror epic for social conservatives: “The Clintons Reconquer Washington” - bigger, badder, and more vindictive than ever.

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This article was originally published in the National Review Online on October 12th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Executive inexperience.

The Yellow-billed Oxpecker stands atop the mighty rhinoceros, gobbling ticks and chirping loudly when danger looms. This tiny bird would make a perfect mascot for Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Akin to that creature, the New York Democrat leaves tiny footprints and has spent more than three decades riding aboard her outsized, accomplished husband, William Jefferson Clinton.

And, like the Oxpecker, Hillary Clinton is remarkably unprepared for the presidency. Beyond helping to secure post-September 11 recovery funds for Gotham, her legislative achievements are rather slight. Lighter yet is her executive experience, which is measurable in grams.

While Clinton has been an outspoken liberal activist since the 1960s, she never has run a business, a city, a state, or a Cabinet department. She was a partner at Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm, but did not administer it. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families aside, she headed none of the non-profits whose boards her website says she joined.

While she conducted President Clinton’s health reform task force in 1993, the plan it concocted in secret collapsed in public. This 1,368-page prescription for government medicine quietly vanished, sparing a Democratic congress the embarrassment of euthanizing it.

Since her 2000 election, Clinton never has chaired a Senate committee. However, she does lead the Senate Superfund and Environmental Health Subcommittee. As its website explains, the panel oversees “recycling, Federal facilities and interstate waste.”

Clinton has presided over something. She commanded the Wellesley College Republicans in 1965, and then became student-government president.

Despite repeated requests, Clinton’s campaign did not identify the executive experiences that supposedly merit her presidency.

Conversely, Clinton’s Democratic rivals display relevant resumes.

Bill Richardson was elected New Mexico’s governor in 2002. He handles a $13.7 billion budget, guides 20,816 state workers, and serves 1.9 million constituents. He was a U.S. House member between 1982 and 1996. He also gained valuable global expertise as United Nations ambassador from 1996 to 1998. Under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush, Richardson has negotiated nuclear issues with North Korean generals and helped free American citizens, soldiers, and dissidents from Cuba, Iraq, and Sudan. As Energy secretary from 1998 to 2000, Richardson addressed Arab-oil dependency and nuclear non-proliferation, and maintained America’s atomic arsenal.

First elected in 1972, Delaware’s Joseph Biden chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also directed it between 2001 and 2003.

Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, elected U.S. representative in 1974 and senator in 1980, chairs the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee.

Even far-Left eccentric Rep. Dennis Kucinich was Cleveland, Ohio’s one-term mayor, years before his 1996 House win.

Elected in 2004, former Harvard Law Review president Barack Obama’s credentials are limited. Nonetheless, the Illinois senator is 2008’s “fresh face” - a phrase rarely in the same sentence with Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s Republican competitors offer considerable executive dexterity: Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor of New York, America’s largest city, with 8 million people. Between 1994 and 2002, he managed budgets as high as $40 billion and as many as 222,836 employees, a payroll surpassed only by Uncle Sam’s and California’s. As U.S. attorney, Giuliani supervised 130 prosecutors and some 200 support staffers between 1983 and 1989. In 2002, he launched Giuliani Partners, a security consultancy that reportedly earned tens of millions in revenues.

Mitt Romney founded Bain Capital, a prosperous enterprise, before becoming Massachusetts’ one-term governor in 2002. His final $36 billion budget funded 43,979 personnel who aided 6.4 million citizens.

Mike Huckabee was Arkansas’s governor between 1996 and 2006. His final, $15.6 billion budget financed 29,151 staffers who covered 2.8 million Arkansans.

Arizona Senator John McCain was a decorated Navy pilot and Vietnam-era POW before his 1982 U.S. House victory. He was elected senator in 1986 and has chaired the committees on Commerce and Indian Affairs.

To Clinton’s credit, she represented America as First Lady in 82 countries, perhaps her most pertinent duty. This may qualify her for secretary of State, a position she could execute with energy and discipline.

However, facing a $2.9 trillion federal budget and 5,120,688 civilian and military employees, Hillary Clinton is ill-equipped to become president of the United States, commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, and leader of the free world. Her executive experience is lighter than a fistful of feathers.

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This article was originally published in the National Review Online on November 19th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Racing through the record.

With the 2008 presidential race in fifth gear, two Leftist commentators are trying to sideswipe the Right by running over the late, great Ronald Wilson Reagan. They are driving the ugliest vehicle available: accusations of racism.

“Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism,” columnist Paul Krugman wrote last September. Consequently, he continued, Ronald Reagan “started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered.”

Krugman alluded to the 1964 Ku Klux Klan killings of three Congress of Racial Equality freedom riders, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. This case was dramatized in the 1988 film, Mississippi Burning.

Columnist Bob Herbert then exacerbated Krugman’s act of grave desecration.

“As president, he [Reagan] actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Herbert wrote. “He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Herbert added: “Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.”

Of course, rubbish like this routinely blows along Manhattan’s sidewalks.

While defending Reagan against these outrageous charges, columnist David Brooks cites an invaluable online recording created August 30, 2006, long before this controversy erupted anew. David Hixson, a broadcaster who retired from Denver’s KEZW radio, presents an amateur audio tape of Reagan’s August 3, 1980, appearance at the Neshoba Country Fair. It seems to be the only available recording of this speech.

“The Fair is a recognized must appearance for any serious Mississippi political candidate and could be a deciding factor for Mississippi votes in the upcoming presidential campaign,” Hixson explains. “Pete Perry, [Neshoba] County GOP Chairman, used this strategy successfully in making the arrangements with the Reagan team on very short notice.”

Democrat Jimmy Carter narrowly won Mississippi in 1976, so that state was quite competitive in 1980. Team Reagan found this particular event attractive after reading a June 1980 National Geographic magazine article titled “Mississippi’s Grand Reunion at the Neshoba County Fair.” Though some staffers worried about this appearance, Reagan believed in honoring his scheduled commitments, not canceling them. Pollster Dick Wirthlin’s advice to the contrary went unheeded.

Rather than addressing a race rally, the tape finds Reagan speaking jovially for 15 minutes to an overflow crowd. He discusses Carter’s failures including inflation, high taxes, runaway spending, and myriad foreign-affairs blunders. Reagan also tells plenty of jokes.

“People have been telling me that Jimmy Carter has been doing his best,” Reagan quips. “And that’s our problem.”

“I know why he’s so interested in poverty,” Reagan says of Senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.). “He never had any when he was a kid.”

Reagan invokes his experiences with welfare reform in California. While he easily could have used that theme to stir racial animus against minority-group members on public assistance, Reagan empathizes with those on relief:

I don’t believe the stereotype, after what we did, of people in need who are there [on welfare] simply because they prefer to be there. We found the overwhelming majority would like nothing better than to be out, with jobs for the future, and out here in the society with the rest of us. The trouble is, again, that bureaucracy has them so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.

Next, Reagan prescribes federalism - the basic conservative, constitutional principle of devolving power and resources as close to localities as possible.

I believe there are programs like that, programs like education and others that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [inaudible].

The crowd roars over the end of that sentence. Reagan continues:

I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, [applause] I will devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions that properly belong there.

Examined honestly, the diabolical phrase, “state’s rights,” which Krugman and Herbert decry as a plea for white power, dissolves into an innocuous call for Conservatism 101: A smaller federal government with revenues and public programs left as close to the people as possible. If Krugman and Herbert are unfamiliar with this concept, they can start by reading the 10th Amendment.

A clearly frustrated Reagan later wrote about this controversy: “Because I said I believed states should be allowed to regain the rights and powers granted to them in the Constitution, he [President Carter] implied I was a racist pandering to Southern voters.”

Federalism may be hemlock to big-government Leftists like Krugman and Herbert, but advocating it is not Morse code for bigots. If it were, Reagan’s largely white, rural, Mississippi audience would have welcomed the words “states rights” with cheers rather than silence.

Krugman and Herbert failed to mention that after supposedly wooing white supremacists with encrypted Klan rhetoric, Reagan flew from Mississippi to Manhattan to address the Urban League the next day. He promoted the idea of low-tax, deregulated “enterprise areas” to stimulate economic growth in America’s ghettoes.

“I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans,” Reagan told the Urban League. “That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose.” This overture to black Americans presumably dimmed the flaming crosses of the very same voters who Reagan allegedly tried to woo just one day earlier.

Krugman and Herbert’s anti-Reagan rage so totally blinds them that they neglected to discuss Democrat Jimmy Carter’s racially insensitive remarks in his 1976 campaign. That April, Carter said he opposed government programs “to inject black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of integration.” He added: “I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods.”

As the April 19, 1976 Time reported:

Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson last week postponed plans to endorse Jimmy Carter and angrily exclaimed: “Is there no white politician I can trust?” Jesse Jackson, director of Chicago’s Operation PUSH, called Carter’s views “a throwback to Hitlerian racism.”

Krugman and Herbert also forgot to chide 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for speaking at…the Neshoba County Fair! The Massachusetts governor ignored Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner on the 24^th anniversary of their murders, which were committed about 12 miles away.

Krugman and Herbert’s liberal limousine glides right past numerous inconvenient truths about Reagan’s record on race:

As the future president was growing up, “The Reagans were so poor that he played in the street with black children and thought little of it,” Nicholas Wapshott remembered in the November 14 New York Sun.

In his memoir, An American Life, Reagan wrote: “My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals…There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance.”

In 1931, Reagan was on Eureka College’s football team. One night, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon recalls, an Elmhurst, Illinois hotelier refused lodging to two of Reagan’s black teammates. Reagan invited them to stay at his parents’ home, where Mr. and Mrs. Reagan welcomed them. Reagan “and one of the players, William Franklin Burghardt, remained friends and correspondents until Mr. Burghardt died in 1981,” Cannon wrote Sunday.

As an adult, Reagan had a long history of bias-free fair-mindedness. As Cannon added:

As a sports announcer in Iowa in the 1930s, Mr. Reagan opposed the segregation of Major League Baseball. As an actor in Hollywood, he quit a Los Angeles country club because it did not admit Jews. In 1978, when preparing to run for president, Mr. Reagan opposed a California ballot initiative that would have barred homosexuals from teaching in the state’s public schools.

Ronald Reagan Jr. recalls the day at a California barbecue when his father dived into a pool to save a black child from drowning.

As president, Reagan named Samuel Pierce, a black man, as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development. While Pierce was outside Reagan’s inner circle, he was in Reagan’s Cabinet. In 1982, Reagan promoted Roscoe Robinson to become the Army’s first black four-star general. Reagan also helped place Clarence Thomas on his path to the United States Supreme Court by naming him chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Reagan’s critics may dismiss these appointees as “tokens.” Of course, they also would denounce Reagan for racism if he had zero appointees of color. Either way, Reagan loses.

Bob Herbert’s deceptions notwithstanding, on June 29, 1982, President Reagan approved a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

‘‘The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished,” Reagan said that day. “Citizens must have complete confidence in the sanctity of their right to vote, and that’s what this legislation is all about.” He added: ‘‘As long as I am in a position to uphold the Constitution, no barrier will come between our citizens and the voting booth.”

Reagan signed this measure at a White House ceremony attended by some 300 people including Senator Kennedy and bipartisan members of Congress. Civil-rights veterans were there, too, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson; Benjamin Hooks, then-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Urban League president John Jacob; the Rev. Joseph Lowery, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s widow, Coretta Scott King.

Krugman whines that “Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday.” Earth to Planet Krugman: On November 2, 1983, President Reagan made Dr. King’s birthday a federal holiday, the first and only such honor for a black American.

As the Associated Press reported back then, “Reagan originally had expressed concern over the cost of honoring King with a national holiday, and said he would have preferred a day of recognition.” Also, when asked at a press conference if he agreed with then-Senator Jesse Helms’s (R., N.C.) claims that sealed FBI files implicated some of King’s associates as Communists, Reagan said: “We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?” Reagan telephoned Mrs. King to apologize for that comment.

Reagan warmly honored King at the White House.

“In America, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination,” Reagan said. “The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther Kings Jr.”

Reagan added that King “awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, ‘Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone.’”

After endorsing the measure before some 200 guests, Reagan handed his signature pen to King’s widow.

As UPI’s then-White House correspondent Helen Thomas wrote: “When it was over, the guests joined in softly singing, ‘We Shall Overcome,’ the battle cry that symbolized King’s struggle for racial equality.”

According to the Washington Post, Jesse Jackson, who attended the event, said of Reagan that day: “We’ve all had high and low moments, and this is one of his high moments.”

“It was a beautiful day, and a beautiful statement was made,” Coretta Scott King told reporters in the Rose Garden. “And the president spoke as president of all the people today.”

President Reagan named Lieutenant General Colin Powell America’s first black national-security adviser in November 1987. He served through Reagan’s second term and was a major player in Reagan’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union’s final leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

“He was not only my boss and commander-in-chief, both in my capacity as a soldier, but also as his national security adviser,” Powell recalled on CBS News after President Reagan passed away in June 2004. “We became very good friends, both during the two years I worked with him and in the year after he retired, as I did with Nancy Reagan.”

Another of Reagan’s unsung achievements is his signature on the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. This federal law green lighted the Indian casinos that dot America, from Connecticut’s enormous, eye-popping Mohegan Sun to the slightly more modest but still impressive Pechanga Casino in Temecula, California. Whatever one thinks of gambling, these enterprises earn billions for Indian tribes that had little beyond their traditions until Ronald Reagan freed them to capitalize on America’s betting jones. A true bigot would have let the red man stay poor and hopeless.

Krugman’s latest sludge bucket holds this lump of deep thought:

Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

O.K., so Reagan loved blacks personally, but pushed us around politically to earn for himself and other Republicans the loyalty of bigoted white voters? So, let’s see: Reagan invited news cameras to capture him extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and signing the MLK holiday into law while sitting beside King’s widow in 1983. This clearly was part of Reagan’s effort to boost his standing among white bigots before seeking reelection in 1984.

And how about making Colin Powell America’s first black NSC chief and enriching Choctaws and Seminoles? Obviously, this was meant to galvanize white racists into electing Reagan’s successor, G. H. W. Bush.

“Why is this slur being floated now?” wonders Hoover Institution scholar Martin Anderson, Reagan’s long-time aide, chief White House domestic-policy adviser, and co-editor of several books documenting Reagan’s insightful, hand-written, speeches, and correspondence on public affairs. “I don’t know - maybe the 20th anniversary of Reagan’s departure from office, which is looming ahead, will show that his legacy is far more important than we knew. And that will be intolerable to a lot of people.”

Especially with the White House at stake, Leftist hacks like Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert will keep trying to smear Ronald Reagan as a racist. The obvious implication is that those of us who love America’s 40th president also are either racists or self-hating blacks.

These annoyingly immortal, liberal fantasies are just a steaming pile of lies.

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This article was originally published in the National Review Online on November 20th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.