Washington Post - October 26, 2007 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/25/ AR2007102502893_pf.html>
Giuliani's Policy Professor At 'Simon University,' Conservative Thinkers Help School the Candidate By Benjamin Wallace-Wells Special to The Washington Post Late in March, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was not at the time known as a zealous supply-sider, held a news conference in Midtown Manhattan to announce that the conservative activist and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes would become his campaign co-chairman.
In the happy bluster of the event (Forbes declared that a Giuliani administration would launch "an assault" on the federal tax code), the former New York mayor was asked whether he would endorse Forbes's signature policy, the flat tax. A decade earlier, when Forbes made the flat tax part of the policy discussion, Giuliani dismissed it out of hand. Now, Giuliani was amenable. "The flat tax," he said, "would make a lot of sense."
It seemed a surprisingly ideological declaration for a candidate who had been billed as the pragmatist and the moderate in the 2008 Republican presidential field. For conservatives who believe in the policy, it split the difference between a thrilling moment and a puzzling one. "I've got to tell you, I don't think he understands what the Steve Forbes flat tax proposal is," said Alan Viard, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
That Forbes and the Giuliani campaign had ever gotten together was largely the work of one man -- a longtime conservative insider and friend of Giuliani's who was once a Republican candidate for governor of California -- Bill Simon. Simon, the Giuliani campaign's policy director, had arranged a lunch at which Giuliani made the case to Forbes that he was the right kind of Republican. "What came through with both Bill and the mayor was that they really got it on the economy and on taxes," Forbes said.
Starting last fall, when Giuliani first called Simon and said he was running for president, Simon, 56, has been more responsible than anyone for Giuliani's policy education, and he has been the agent charged with managing the sometimes eager, sometimes awkward relationship between the former mayor of a liberal city and the conservative establishment.
Well before Giuliani said publicly that he would be a candidate, Simon put him through a rolling seminar that those in the campaign called Simon University, bringing in thinkers to brief Giuliani on key issues. The result is that though many of Giuliani's campaign operatives worked with him when he was mayor, his policy staffers, who have largely been assembled by Simon, come mostly from the think- tank world.
The roster of the seminars was a who's who of conservative intellectuals, and their ideas a menu of conservative thought. There were neoconservatives Norman Podhoretz, John R. Bolton and R. James Woolsey Jr. on foreign policy, as well as less ideological thinkers such as Gen. Anthony C. Zinni and Yale professor Charles Hill; the Hoover Institution's Michael Boskin on taxes and economic policy; Hoover's race scholars Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell; and retired Gen. Jack Keane and the military scholar Frederick W. Kagan, the authors of the Iraq "surge."
"Simon is an incredible asset for the Giuliani campaign," said Grover Norquist, a conservative anti-tax activist. "He has the added advantage for Giuliani of being a serious social conservative and a pro-lifer, which gives people some assurance that social conservatives and judges will not be ignored."
Though Giuliani's natural inclination has been to talk primarily about national security and his experiences managing the city government in New York, Simon has helped coach him to express himself more prominently on positions that might resonate with the Republican Right: his conservative-leaning disposition on tax and economic policy, and his strict-constructionist views on judges.
Giuliani's senior policy advisers tend to favor some of the least popular elements of Bush administration policy. His most visible foreign policy adviser, Podhoretz, supports an armed intervention in Iran and a lengthy stay in Iraq. Giuliani's lead economic adviser, Boskin, was a prominent proponent of privatizing Social Security and remains convinced of the long-term necessity of private accounts. And Forbes, his campaign co-chairman, believes the Bush tax cuts did not go far enough in cutting marginal tax rates for the wealthy.
This has left Simon managing two ambitious, politically essential projects at once: helping to demonstrate that Giuliani is a conservative, and trying, through Giuliani, to ensure that his corner of the conservative movement is still powerful enough to pick the Republican nominee.
Deep Roots in Conservatism
It is a tradition that Simon has a stake in defending. His father, William E. Simon Sr., was a wealthy Wall Street bond trader who became secretary of the Treasury under President Richard M. Nixon and, later, a legendary architect of the modern conservative movement. But he was also legendarily mean, "a mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone," in the words of his old friend Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. Simon would awaken his children on weekend mornings by dousing their heads with buckets of cold water.
The elder Simon came away from the experience of Watergate with a disgust for the partisan character of the affair, and the capital. The experience of impeachment convinced him, like members of the liberal "Net roots" 30 years later, not that partisanship was necessarily poisonous, but that his opponents were far better at partisanship than his side was.
The experience "had a very combative influence on Bill Simon the father," said James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation. Simon would spend the remainder of his life helping to redress the balance -- spending years on the boards of the Heritage and Olin foundations and the Hoover Institution -- in his person melding the old Republican establishment with the antsy, rising conservative one.
For all the aggression of his father's parenting style, Bill Simon Jr. followed him in his politics ("basically a chip off the old block in terms of his perspective," Feulner says); his deeply felt, conservative Catholicism (a Knight of Malta, Simon makes a pilgrimage to the cathedral in Lourdes, France, every year); and ultimately, his career.
After Williams College and law school at Boston College, Simon went to work for Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney in New York. Simon said he saw an innovative public policy sensibility in his old boss: "Rudy pioneered investigations in the forfeiture area, the use of criminal RICO [racketeering law], areas of law that hadn't previously been explored."
By the late 1990s, Simon had moved to Los Angeles and was running his family's investment firm with his brother and father and serving on the boards of conservative groups: Heritage, Hoover and his father's foundation. He struck associates as less of an ideologue than his father, a quick study but not a committed policy man.
In 2000, three months after his father died, Simon decided to run for governor after being approached by some members of the California Republican organization. Simon ran as the conservative in the Republican primary in 2002, attacking Democratic Gov. Gray Davis over the looming budget deficit, and used his experience at Hoover and Heritage to frame himself as the candidate of ideas needed to fix a failing state.
Simon cast himself as an insurgent conservative candidate, and he upset the favorite in the primary, former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, a moderate. Later, as it became clear that a Davis victory in the general election was likely, Simon's media consultant, Ed Rollins, developed a very aggressive, last-ditch, anti-immigration television ad that he wanted the campaign to run. Opinion in the campaign was divided; many thought it simply nasty, politics at its worst, while others considered it Simon's last, best chance.
Simon decided not to run the ad, and he lost by five percentage points.
'Proud to Be His Friend'
During presidential campaigns, relationships can come encased in legend. For Simon, the source of his legend is that he happened to be in New York on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and happened to be eating breakfast with the mayor when the World Trade Center was struck.
They were discussing Simon's gubernatorial bid and preparing to leave when Giuliani got the call and rushed downtown. Simon watched the next days unfold and saw Giuliani acquire the aura that has been a sustaining basis of his presidential candidacy. "When I watched Rudy on TV, I wouldn't say I was surprised about how he reacted," Simon recalls, "but I will say I was proud to be his friend."
Over the summer of 2006, as Giuliani began to seriously contemplate a presidential run, Simon began hosting occasional roundtables with scholars at Stanford University's Hoover Institution during the former mayor's California trips. He eventually signed on as the policy director for his friend's presidential campaign.
For Simon, Giuliani's record as mayor described a pragmatist who didn't enjoy just a casual affinity with grass-roots conservatives because they both hated liberals -- he was also a thinker for whom pragmatism and an instinctual conservatism were intertwined. "It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing," Simon said when asked whether he believes Giuliani is a conservative by ideological conviction or came to his politics through the process of governing. "But both of those two lines are there."
The Simon University seminars that the policy mavens helped put together to refine Giuliani's conservative sensibilities were designed to mirror sessions Giuliani had sat through 15 years earlier, between his first, failed run for mayor of New York and his second, successful one.
Those sessions helped turn Giuliani into an innovative pragmatist as mayor, an empiricist who leaned on new technologies to help dramatically reduce crime and presided over a new urban prosperity.
But with Giuliani unlikely now to attract many conservative voters through his positions on social issues, Simon and the Giuliani campaign have tried, with some success, to suggest that his record in New York reveals a conservative's instincts.
On the stump, a few quiet accomplishments from Giuliani's eight years as mayor have been widely aired: The campaign has emphasized the decline in the number of abortions in New York while he was mayor. And the candidate has spoken frequently, and with a supply-side feeling, about the results of his cut in the hotel occupancy tax -- a move, he says, that helped fill hotels and thus drove up the city's revenue from the tax.
The hotel occupancy tax is a good sale for conservatives because it was a "miniature supply-side experiment," Norquist said. "I like people who can explain to you why they did it and why it worked, and Giuliani can." This presentation of Giuliani's record has also won him accolades from the conservative Club for Growth.
But if this presentation of Giuliani, a fiscal conservative with some socially conservative leanings, has worked in some circles in Washington, it has struck many New York insiders as something between a moderately misleading recasting of his record and naked spin.
Fran Reiter, a New York operative who managed Giuliani's mayoral reelection campaign, broke with him last month, signing on with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). "He took a political turn to the right -- clearly," Reiter said at the time.
Others say Giuliani's current positioning is out of touch with the reality of his governance. The nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission -- a business-backed watchdog group in New York -- recently put out a report highly critical of Giuliani's performance. It found that though his term as mayor coincided with a tremendous economic boom in the city, he left a larger budget deficit in his last year than his predecessor, Democrat David N. Dinkins, had left him. The group says he cut too-generous deals with municipal unions and failed most fiscal conservative tests.
"This idea that he was squeezing blood out of a stone is completely ridiculous," said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Other observers say a close examination of Giuliani's record in New York reveals a man whose economic policy, in the words of Jonathan Bowles, "almost exclusively focused on providing discretionary tax breaks to a small number of the largest corporations," rather than the broad tax simplification and supply- side sensibility he now endorses.
Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, found that Giuliani gave more than 70 tax breaks to individual companies in order to keep them in New York, "even though some said openly they would not have left if they had not gotten the tax breaks."
Steering the Campaign
These days, Simon divides his time between California -- where his investment firm is, and where he is chair of the state's Giuliani campaign -- and New York, at campaign headquarters. Every Monday, he hosts a call during which a few senior members of the campaign staff -- Stephen Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis; John Avlon, Simon's deputy; and Piereson -- go over policies and speeches in development.
It is clear, during these calls, that the group is proud of Giuliani's foreign policy stance and sees something historic in it. The candidate's essay in Foreign Affairs remains a touchstone and is discussed as the basis for upcoming speeches and articles.
Giuliani framed the piece around the "long war" with Muslim fundamentalists and said the United States should not now be working toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. He advocated building a missile defense system and increasing the number of combat brigades, and he suggested that U.S. policy toward Iran, "should all else fail," might focus on destroying that nation's nuclear arsenal.
One of Simon's self-appointed roles during these calls is to urge the group toward even minor policy points that can distinguish Giuliani from the other candidates. Another role is to operate as a political compass, helping to ensure that the campaign's conservative message is preserved.
One recent Monday, the group was discussing a speech that Giuliani was scheduled to give before the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group. "We have an embarrassment of riches with respect to federalism," Goldsmith said. "We have I bet the top 10 federalism scholars."
Simon jumped in. "Did you guys see the op-ed in today's [Wall Street] Journal by Stephen Calabresi?" he asked. Calabresi, an adviser to the campaign, is the founder of the Federalist Society and a proponent of originalism, a theory of law favored by many conservatives that stresses that constitutional questions should be informed by asking how the document was perceived in the framers' own time. "Maybe there's a way to weave some of the originalism into the speech in November." The group agreed to try.
In its composition and its intended audience, the Giuliani policy team can sometimes seem self-contained, a subsidiary of the conservative think-tank world. A lingering danger for the campaign is that with this association it may be linking itself too closely to unpopular policies of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and to an elite form of conservatism.
Some of Giuliani's foreign policy advisers in particular -- Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes and Michael Rubin -- seem similar in outlook and approach to the neoconservatives whom some blame for pushing the nation into the Iraq war.
Simon, who talks frequently of making sure that the policy team encompasses the whole sprawl of conservative ideas, is sensitive on this point. "The head of our foreign policy unit, Charles Hill, is not a neocon; Robert Conquest, Ruth Wedgewood, these people are not neocons," he said. "If you look to the people who came in to brief the mayor -- Tony Zinni is not a neocon. In fairness, I think it's an eclectic mix."
In some of the early primary states, the campaign's embrace of the conservative establishment and resulting distance from the Republican Party's grass roots -- such as evangelical Christians, who have reacted with suspicion if not hostility to Giuliani -- has looked like a political risk. The campaign in Iowa, said David Redlawsk, a political scientist at the University of Iowa and the director of the Hawkeye Poll, has been harmed by a perception that it is out of touch, a view that "is partly a consequence of having a campaign that operates from a top-down, East Coast perspective."
Simon and Giuliani's policy team spent much of the spring working to outline what the campaign has called its Twelve Commitments, promises Giuliani is making to the American voter. Some of these promises seem standard Republican fare: restoring fiscal discipline, cutting taxes and simplifying the tax code. In others, there are flickers of Giuliani's experience in New York (instituting school choice) and pugnaciousness (he promises "to keep America on offense in the terrorists' war on us").
And then there are policies that might please the conservative base: a declared preference for the strict-constructionist judges the base prefers, and a pledge to "increase adoptions, decrease abortions, and protect the quality of life for our children."
On the big questions, Simon seems content to let Giuliani stand for an extension of the Bush administration, with all the political promise and risk that contains.
When asked to detail the ways in which a Giuliani administration would be different from the Bush administration, he is reticent.
"I think I would shy away," Simon said, "from pointing out differences."