Here’s
one conservative’s response to Giuliani’s speech at Hoover about focusing his campaign and his party on freedom when it comes to taxes, education, and health care. Does he mean to make his party into a more insistently and consistently libertarian one? And does judicial activism contribute to or limit our freedom? And what about, someone might ask, national security, terrorism, and all that stuff? I tend to agree that the reform experiment this speech suggests, pushed too far at least, would probably prove fatal for Rudy in the primaries.
Yep, hed be dumb to push this too far. Hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of conservatives see the world "freedom" as code for "license." The core notion of conservativism is liberty balanced by personal and civic virtue. I want to hear about nationhood, about the preservation of our culture, about immigration reform...health and education are important, but "man does not live by bread alone." This is something the libertarians tend to forget.