Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Politics

Refreshingly Candid

by Clay Staggs

For the record, I remain officially undecided about the GOP primary. Frankly, I think that all four Republican front-runners would make such better presidents than HRC or Obama that it’s somewhat difficult for me to choose among them.

Rudy Guiliani continues to intrigue me the most. He’s pretty out of step with some of my views, but I like his leadership style so much that I can’t strike him off my list. In fact, if I lean in any direction right now, I lean slightly in his.

I ran across an interview with him on ABC’s website that illustrates pretty well why I like him. It’s been all over the press lately that his ally and former NYC Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik has been indicted on corruption charges. Some may recall that Kerik was, on Guiliani’s urging, initially appointed by Bush to be the Secretary of Homeland Security, a nomination that was ultimately withdrawn during the vetting process, likely on account of the same facts that lead to this indictment.

Now, all of this is not good for the Guiliani campaign. After all, one of Guiliani’s most impressive resume lines is his time as US Attorney in NYC, when he aggressively worked to bring down some major organized crime rings. (In fact, it was recently revealed that the five crime families he went after took a vote on whether to kill him - it was 3-2 against the hit. Rudy discusses this in the interview linked below.)

Now, there’s lot of spinning a politician could do when confronted with a fact scenario like the one with Kerik. Stop and imagine what Bill Clinton would have said. It would all be about how the vetting process failed, how he never knew - yada, yada, yada. Contrast with Rudy:

In a press conference today in Dubuque, Iowa, Giuliani told reporters, “I have made a mistake, I made a mistake in not clearing him effectively enough.”

Wow. Was that a politician admitting a mistake that I just heard? The reporter then questioned whether the Kerik affair would taint Guiliani’s reputation, both as Mayor (when Kerik was police commmissioner) and US Attorney:

“I think that people are capable of looking at all of that and saying we have to judge that in the overall context of everything that I did,” he said. “And the balance is very much in favor of ‘I must have been making the right decisions if the city of New York turned around.’”

Giuliani even defended Kerik’s performance as police commissioner.

“You know, people are complex,” he said. “But the fact is that the results for the city of New York were excellent results.”

When asked if he thinks highlighting those results diminishes or excuses the potential crimes Kerik committed, Giuliani said, “of course not.”

“How about, it’s realistic? It’s the complexity of human life and the reality of human life,” Giuliani said. “Richard Nixon had this very serious problem, but was his breakthrough with China one of the historic things that happened in the 20th century? Can’t take that away from him — it was.”

To me, this is really refreshing. Rudy first admitted it was his own mistake. Then he went on to acknowledge, without using these words, the fallen nature of humanity. And that, despite that fallen nature, sometimes good things come about anyway. Now, I see this all through the lens of my reformed world view - depravity, and yet God’s grace at the same time. Rudy may not understand it in those terms, and he certainly isn’t in sync with all my other views, but I think he gets some very basic facts right about the world we live in. And that’s something I can’t say about most politicians on the stage today.

The whole article is here. Interesting reading.