Of Tax Cuts and Terror

Opinion Journal: A transcript of our interview with Rudy Giuliani

Excerpt:

I'll try to be as brief as I am capable of, maybe three or four minutes. These are the 12 commitments that I have made, and I think I can summarize these into two things that I believe the next election is going to be about, and the next presidency is going to be about. It's going to be about how we approach terrorism and how we approach the economy--meaning the international economy and domestic. I don't think that the two things are separate any longer. In the old days, when you said "approaching the economy," you meant domestic issue. I think now you mean a foreign policy issue.

I think the big distinction and the big choice the American people are going to get to make in November 2008 is: Do we remain on offense or do we go back on defense? Do we go forward with a more--let's call it a more sophisticated being on offense against terrorism, which builds on the successes and the failures of the past (like you always do with any war or major endeavor)--or do we go back to the 1990s, which was essentially the period of time in which we minimized Islamic terrorism, didn't recognize its existence at the level in which it really existed, and dealt with it in a kind of sporadic way--sometimes we would respond, sometimes we wouldn't respond. We never really recognized the full dimension of it. Wrong then, but at least arguably excusable then, because maybe some people didn't see it at that point. You could make this argument going back to Nixon, and maybe even Johnson--the end of the Johnson administration--that the presidents should have seen the Islamic threat and terrorist threat.

Comment: I'm still hopeful on McCain, but Rudy Giuliani's views on economics and law reflect my views. The OpinionJournal's summary is here