CQ Transcriptions, March 2, 2007

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani
Conservative Political Action Conference
Washington, DC
March 2, 2007

Thank you very, very much, George. I appreciate that very kind instruction. Those were really very, very generous things that you said about me. The only thing—I think if I started swatting government agencies with a hand bag, I'd have a whole new issue. (Laughter)

And like everyone else, I have enough issues to deal with. I don't need another one.

(Laughter)

But I thank you very, very much for that instruction.

This is probably the first time that some of you—maybe most of you—have been in Washington since the Democrats took control of Congress.

How many have been here? First time, right?

Well, things really feel a little different now, don't they? It feels like they want to take control of everything.

I understand that next week they're going to debate the entire week to see if they can make the World Series a nonbinding result. (Laughter)

Now, that really kind of bothered me more than most things, because I thought the whole discussion of the nonbinding resolution—although absolutely their right, and certainly their right to express their opinion whether they're for the increase or against the increase—but I thought it kind of illustrated what's wrong with Washington right now: that they really think they were sent here to do nonbinding resolutions.

I mean, the reason we elect people to the United States Congress, or to public office, is to make decisions, not to be commentators.

George Will is a great commentator. That's his role. Or so many others, like Michael Barone, who he pointed out, or Chris Matthews or... (Chorus of Boos)

OK, we got to go. We're trying to even it up on all sides here.

But we have commentators who are conservative, commentators are liberal, some in the middle. But that's what they do, they comment.

What we send people to Washington for, at least we thought we did, was to make decisions. And the reason they did a nonbinding resolution is the same reason that they can't seem to deal with immigration, they can't seem to deal with Social Security, they can't seem to deal with the entitlements that costs are out of control, they can't seem to exercise fiscal discipline.

They can't make tough decision and they don't want to be on the hook for tough decisions.

And part of what the next administration is going to have to do is to get the United States government back to making decisions again, becoming a government that functions. (Applause)

I am very, very happy to be here at CPAC. One of my heroes, Ronald Reagan, spoke here 12 times. I think I'm right, 12 times, which—I don't know if it's a record or not, but probably for a president it is. And the people in this room really—I'm sure you all know it, but whether you know it or not—you really represent a new generation of the Reagan revolution.

I consider myself very, very fortunate to be part of that. I worked for President Reagan here in Washington for the first couple of years of his administration. And he is, in fact, one of my heroes. And I learned many lessons from him.

And if you'd like to know most them, you can get my book. It's a nice book. It really is. It's a nice book. (Laughter)

There's a paperback version and a hardcover version. Oh, I can't do that anymore. I'm a candidate. I can't do that anymore. Well, I'll give you my book, OK? (Laughter)

But I think the most important lesson that I learned from Ronald Reagan was the importance of optimistic leadership. I believe Ronald Reagan was able to achieve the things he was able to achieve because Ronald Reagan was a leader, which is a combination of being a visionary and a practical person who can achieve results.

Ronald Reagan had great dreams and great vision. He saw other things that other people didn't see. He saw a world that could be free of communism. He saw communism as not just another alternative morally equivalent economic philosophy or political philosophy. He saw it as an evil that took from people the most important thing they have: freedom. (Applause)

And because he was able to have that dream, he was able to figure out how to get there. And because he had that dream, he was able to properly evaluate public opinion.

And this is so critical and so important in a leader, particularly now, with all of the information that we have and all of the incident analysis and all of the polls.

Ronald Reagan had a place he was going: a world free of communism, a world free of mutually assured destruction, a world free of the kind of tyranny that the Soviets had not only over their own territory, but over Poland and Eastern Europe: lack of freedom of religion, inability to elect your leaders, no freedom of speech.

He saw this as evil. But he could envision getting to a place that they would be defeated, because he understood something that all of us have to understand—any of us, whether we're running for president or we just arrive here for the first time, seeking to become a citizen or whatever: We're a country of ideas. That's what we are. Ideas link us together.

We're not a country of one ethnic group. We're not French or German or Italian or Spanish or whatever group. We're not Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or anything like that.

We're all different religions. And we're all different races.

Since we're not identified that way, what identifies us as Americans? The thing that identifies us as Americans are our ideas. And our ideas are wonderful ideas. And they're ideas that the world is moving toward.

Ronald Reagan understood that. He understood that and he was able, therefore, to make very difficult decisions and to stick with them even when they were unpopular.

I remember when he deployed the cruise missiles and pointed them at the Soviets. Very, very unpopular. ABC did a documentary about the end of the world when he did that.

And then I remember when he walked out of Reykjavik—very, very unpopular.

A typical politician wouldn't have done either of those two things. Maybe even a typical president wouldn't have done either of those two things, because they made him unpopular. His unfavorability went up; his favorability went down.

So why did he make those decisions? He made those decisions because he could consult something broader than just public opinion. He could consult a set of ideas, a set of principles, a set of goals. And he could say: Well, right now public opinion actually isn't correct.

Abraham Lincoln had to do the same thing during the Civil War. The Civil War was very, very unpopular. Draft riots in New York in 1863. Three generals that turned out to be failures.

Lincoln was viewed by many, many people as an incompetent president. The war took too long.

Well, Abraham Lincoln actually didn't have to listen to polls on CNN. They didn't have them then. (Laughter)

But I suspect, even if they did have polls on CNN, and ABC and NBC, Abraham Lincoln would have made exactly the same decision, which is: It's my goal to keep this union together. It's my goal to end slavery in order to extend freedom. And I'm not going to cave in to the immediate pressure of public opinion because, if I do and we end this war and we entreat frustration, we're going to have two separate countries and they're going to go to war with each other who knows how many times in the future and we're going to lose a lot more lives.

And those are the calculations that leaders have to make. And when you do nonbinding resolutions, you're trying to escape the responsibility of making those decisions. (Applause)

There's another thing they learned from Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan used to say, "My 80 percent ally is not my 20 percent enemy."

What he meant by that is that we all don't see eye to eye on everything. You and I have a lot of common beliefs that are the same, and we have some that are different.

You just described your relationship, I think, with your husband, your wife, your children. We don't all agree on everything.

I don't agree with myself on everything. (Laughter)

And the point of a presidential election is to figure out who do you believe the most, and what do you think are the most important things for this country at a particular time?

We do believe in many of the same things, I'm sure. We believe in giving freedom to people. I think the core of the Republican Party and the historic mission of the Republican Party—and the Republican Party makes its greatest contribution when it's giving more freedom to people.

I believe that we... (Applause)

And we do that in ways that show a distinct difference with the Democratic Party. We believe in lowering taxes. I believe in lowering taxes. I don't just believe in lowering taxes; I did it many, many times, as the mayor of New York City. (Applause)

And the first one that I did—I remember the first tax cut that I did was the Hotel Occupancy Tax. It was a small cut, in terms of gross revenues. And it was the only one that I could get from the city council and the state legislature, because we have a $2.3 billion deficit.

And, as George pointed out, the recommendations for dealing with the deficit were to add more taxes. So not only did I add no more taxes, I subtracted a tax. And it was really, really hard to do.

The day after we accomplished it—which was, like, a big victory for my new, young administration—my first deputy mayor and oldest friend, Peter Powers, came into my room and he said: "You just set a record for tax cuts." (Laughter)

I said, "It can't be. It was only a measly little tax cut. We wanted to do, like, 10 times that." So I saw it as a defeat.

He said, "No, you just sit a record for tax cuts."

And I said, "Why?"

He said, "Because they've never done one in New York before." (Laughter)

It was the only one ever done. (Applause)

Before I became the mayor of New York, New York used to be called, "The ungovernable city." We were suffering an average of about 2,000 murders a year. And one out of every seven New Yorkers, just about, was on welfare. And it was calculated to grow by 15, 20 percent per year.

We were, in the words of Senator Moynihan, "Defining deviancy down day by day."

What that meant was the things that used to shock us 10 years earlier were now accepted as the normal things that happened: three or four people murdered in a day.

Back in the 1920s, the 1930s, I believe the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago, which was one of the great crimes of the early part of the 20th century, I believe it was seven people killed in one day. We use to have average days in New York where we had seven and eight people killed.

We accepted pornography, prostitution, as just the commonplace. We accepted street-level drug-dealing as something we couldn't do anything about.

And we were constantly taking the rules and the norms of society and making them more and more reduced and more and more, as Senator Moynihan would say, "Deviant."

I didn't believe that. I didn't believe that was the right direction. I didn't believe that was where people wanted to go. And it seemed to me that the most important civil right that we had was the right to be free, the right to be safe, the right to be able to enjoy our city or our suburb or our rural area.

So I made it a very, very large priority to reduce crime. And we did it by getting people to take accountability. We did it through the COMSTAT program, the broken windows theory.

I had a great police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who helped to devise these and execute these policies.

GIULIANI: But they led to a cut in crime of about 50 percent and a cut in homicide of two-thirds. And... (Applause)

And we went to being the crime capital of America to being the safest large city in America. And that is a result and an outcome that I think was a very, very valuable one.

But I'm going to tell you one that I think was even more valuable. And I don't believe the crime would be continuing to go down in New York City if this second one hasn't happened.

I think all of the emphasis on COMSTAT, policing, and broken windows theory, and number of police officers—COMSTAT program is a very intricate program that I used for 25 other city agencies to make them more efficient.

I think they're all very important to bring crime down. But New York City is one of the few cities where crime is continuing to decline. And there hasn't been a single year since 1994 when it hasn't declined.

I'm not sure there's any other city in the America like that.

And here's why I think that's the case. (Applause)

When I came into office, I told you, there were one out of seven New Yorkers on welfare — 1.1 million to be exact. The projection was that it was going to go from 1.1 million to 1.5 million.

And I said: We can't accept that. We have to dream differently, we have to look differently, we have to think about how we change that.

So the first thing I did was we established a "workfare" program. And we said, if you were getting a welfare check, you had to work for 20 hours a week in exchange for your welfare check. (Applause)

And we did it. (Applause)

And we did it—as I explained to people over and over again in every part of the city —we did it because we cared about people more.

Because I believe that our policies and our programs to give people access to the kind of economic system that we have bring more people out of poverty by a lot than the systems of dependency that lock people into poverty. (Applause)

The end result is that we took the welfare program—by using workfare, by changing the way in which we measure the success of welfare workers, we were able to remove 500,000 to 600,000 people from the welfare rolls; we were able to find jobs for hundreds of thousands of people per year because we turned the welfare workers into employment agents.

The idea of being a welfare worker in New York City changed from putting people on welfare as the outcome that was desired to finding a job for someone.

And by the time we were finished, one of the things that I was the proudest of was that we changed the name of the New York City Welfare Office to New York City Job Centers. (Applause)

And when people walk into those job centers now, instead of walking in and then walking out hopeless, more than half the people that go in—and sometimes a lot more than that—come in hopeless, but they walk out with hope.

And when you have more people in your society with hope than with hopelessness, then you're a society that's growing. You're a society that doesn't have to worry too much—or as much—about policing and worry too much about broken families.

Because when people have hope, what you find is—realistic hope—what you find is that the best people for taking care of problems are themselves. People are the best at taking care of their own problems if you just give them the necessary freedom and the necessary support to do that. (Applause)

Let me give you one other example. And the first two that I talked about is an agenda that's been accomplished, or at least largely accomplished, and has to be continued. The next one is an agenda one for the future.

If I look at America's future and I think about: What is it going to be? I told you I learned from Ronald Reagan to be an optimist. I have no question that America has more strengths than weaknesses. I have no question that America's strengths will prevail—and we'll talk at the end about terrorism. And I have no doubt that America will prevail over the Islamic terrorists—absolutely no doubt about it. (Applause)

It is a very serious question of how long, and what kind of detours, and how many casualties we have along the way.

But the power of our ideas, of those ideas that I mentioned in the beginning, are so great that we know that the human mind and the human soul and the human heart is moving in our direction.

And when you can expose them to these ideas and you can get past that initial step, as we saw in Eastern Europe, then the flood and the movement toward these ideas is dramatic.

But if you ask me, "What is the thing that I'm the most concerned about," aside from terrorism and the obvious implications of it and what it could do to us at any time, any place, the second most important thing that I'm worried about is American education.

And I'm worried about American education because I see this global economy emerging. It's a wonderful thing for us. We're getting what we wished for 20 years ago: A China where it is more likely that we have to economically complete with them rather than go to war with them.

That's what Americans want. Americans want countries we can do business with.

I keep telling people, all over the world: Americans don't like war. We're not a warlike people. We've never liked any of the wars we've been in.

We engage in war because we absolutely have to. And sometimes we wait until the last minute and do it, as we did in the Second World War, and probably make a mistake because of that.

However, what is the thing Americans want to do with you?

Americans want to sell you something. (Laughter)

That's what we want to do. We want to sell you a product. (Applause)

We'd like to sell you Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola. We'd like to sell you a McDonald's hamburger, or we'd like to sell you a very, very intricate technology system that we invented, or a wonderful new procedure for putting stents in human beings and being able to avoid the risk of heart attack or ameliorate the results of heart attack.

That's the kinds of things Americans—we want to sell you something. As an alternative, we don't mind buying something from you.

In essence, we want to do business with you.

And we're getting the world that we wished for. We're getting the world that Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and all the presidents that had to deal with the Cold War—in some cases setbacks and in some case great successes— but we're getting the world that we dreamed of, even with the setbacks in Russia.

And I think we're on an inevitable path, with some real detours, so that we're more likely to be competing—maybe fiercely sometimes—with Russia, and not going to war with Russia.

How are we going to, if not win that competition, maintain our very, very commanding position that we have right now for our benefit and for the benefit of our children and grandchildren?

If we get this right, all the rest will fall into place. We have to educate our young people better than we are doing right now.(Applause)

And it's not just my children or your children. Obviously, my children's education is enormously important to me and your children's education is enormously important to you. And I imagine that you have some pretty good control over it—either in a public school system you're satisfied with and think it's very good, or a parochial system, or a private system.

But my children and your children, their success in this global economy, this global economic competition, their success is not just going to be about what kind of education they have.

It's going to be what kind of general education most Americans have. Because we're going to need a population that is better educated to compete in the information sciences and in all of the much more intricate kinds of jobs that will be the kinds of jobs that Americans can do successfully and profitably.

And my real concern is our education for all of our children in K-12.

And let me tell you what I think needs to be done about it very quickly. I'll tell you a little story of when I was the mayor of New York City, because this is something that I changed my mind about.

I began being mayor of New York City thinking I could reform the New York City school system.

And I—OK... (Laughter)

I made mistakes. (Laughter)

I'm willing to admit them and apologize for them. (Applause)

I don't know if they got it but, in any event, that was a mistake. We're not able to reform the New York City school system, except for some reforms, but they didn't have the impact that it had to have in really revolutionizing education—which is what has to be done if we're going to catch up and we're going to have our kids in the competitive position they have to be in.

This happened about 1998, 1999. The...

(Audio Gap)

... working with private organizations, I tried to get this information out as best we could. But I knew that we hadn't had had great success in getting it to everybody. And I was really worried about what the results would be.

Do you know how many applications there were for 2,500 scholarships? One hundred sixty-eight thousand.

One hundred sixty-eight thousand parents—because the parents basically had to make out the applications; they were for young children—168,000 parents saying: I don't want to send my child to the school that you are requiring my child to go to, that you are demanding my child go to, that you are saying my child has to go to and if my child doesn't go to that school I'm going to violate the law and my child may be taken away from me.

And we use drastic pressure, tremendous power, in order to force children into schools that they and their parents do not want them to be in.

And that's at the core of what's deteriorating our public education system.

The genius of America — and we can apply this to health care or we can apply it to education or to science or to anything — the genius of America is a free market, private solutions, competition and, ultimately, the profit motive.

Those are the things... (Applause)

And when we look at our schools, instead we create a monolithic (ph) model in which parents and children have no voice at all, and then we expect it to be accountable and we use government bureaucrats to try to impose that accountability.

And it has some marginal success. There's been improvement with No Child Left Behind.

But the better evaluators for the standards of No Child Left Behind and the others are not the people in the Department of Education, not the people in the boards of education. The very best evaluators—and the power has to shift to the people who will evaluate it much more effectively: the parents. (Applause)

If you do that—if you do that—you will save the public school system in this country. Because, yes, there will be 168,000 parents who choose some alternative other than the public school system for their children the first time around.

But as you move on and on with this competition, the public school system will—on its own—solve the problems that we're now trying to solve from the political process from above.

They will deal with teacher tenure. They will deal with lack of accountability. They will deal with incentive pay. They'll put in effect the things that are necessary so that they become the school that the parent chooses as opposed to the school that the parent runs away from.

And it is so frustrating to watch this, because here we're this country that has achieved more than any other country on Earth and more than any other country in the history of the world; there are some basic principles as to the reason for that, and we are denying all those principles in maybe the most important thing that we have to do, which is educating our young people.

And I am committed—as a candidate and, if God is good and willing, as a president —to see that we do everything we can to bring that about as a way to make America competitive 10, 15 and 20 years from now.

And...(Applause)

The last issue that I'll deal with is the one that's the most important.

It's the most important because it's not necessarily the most important because we want to make it the most important, but the most important because other people are trying to make it the most important.

It is very, very critical for the United States—and I've traveled all around the world, and I've been in just about every part of the world in the last three or four years, as this war on terror has been going on defending what we're doing and why we're doing it.

But it's very important to begin every discussion, both in the United States— because we have to remind our own people of this—and all over the world, by saying what I said before: America is a peaceful country. We want peace. That is our desire.

That was the desire of Ronald Reagan in confronting communism—peace through strength. His desire was to have no mutually assured destruction, so that we didn't have this craziness there that one side or the other could blow up the world.

Our desire, right now, is to have peace. And maybe we made a mistake in calling this the war on terror. This is not our war on them. This is their war on us. They... (Applause)

We desire peace. We want to sell you something. We want to buy something from you. We want to do business with you.

This war is over when they stop planning to come here and kill us. When that ends, the war is over. (Applause)

Until then, we have to remain on offense against terrorists. (Applause)

The thing that President Bush did for us that I believe will be the same as the critical decisions that Harry Truman made in the early stages of the Cold War, the critical decisions about the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift and Korea and challenging aggression—even though they were setbacks.

You know, we look at Harry Truman when he was president—very unpopular. We look back on Harry Truman now and we look at those big decisions that he made. And if those decisions were made wrong, who knows how much longer the Cold War would have gone on.

Well, George Bush had to make a similar decision in a very similar circumstance to Harry Truman: a new president.

George Bush was in office, I think, about eight months, right? It had to be eight months when September 11th, 2001, happened. And all of a sudden, he is faced with the worst attack, the worst domestic attack in the history of our country, and an unprecedented kind of thing—shocking and unprecedented.

Within a few days, he put us on a new course. He turned the whole ship around. We were, until then, on defense against terrorists. What that meant was: They would attack us, and sometimes we would respond, and sometimes we wouldn't. And when we responded, we would not respond as if they were at war with us; we would respond as if it was a criminal attack.

That's what happened when they attacked us in 1993 in my city, in the same place. We prosecuted them as if it were one of the 1,900 or 2,000 murders that happened that year. We didn't get the fact that they were at war with us.

And they attacked us a number of times after that—our interests and our people— and we responded, but never recognizing that it had to be a very, very significant long-term response.

And then they attacked us on the USS Cole and we didn't respond at all.

I don't blame people for that. I don't. I don't think it is instructive or helpful to do that. There were a lot of things going on and it's very, very hard sometimes to see these things as their developing. It's only with the hindsight of a shocking event or history that you can see these things.

But I do blame people for not seeing it after September 11th, 2001. (Applause)

And what President Bush did and what we have to build on and expand and continually try to figure out how to do better — because that's the nature of human activity, it's the nature of government, it's the nature of war: that you're going to succeed at some things, fail at others.

It was the nature of the Civil War, it was the nature of the Second World War. The Battle of the Bulge was probably—probably—the worst intelligence disaster in American military history, and we sustained some of our greatest losses. It was a big, big mistake, made by some of the greatest Americans: the president, the secretary of war, the general who turned out to be one of our great presidents.

I mean, there are people who are responsible for the mistake. But the reality is that it's the general thrust of what we're doing with terrorism that is enormously important, not the fact that every single thing hasn't worked.

We have to be on offense against them.

Offense means that we have to be willing to use our military power in order to stop them, engage them. We have to be willing to use our intelligence resources. We have to ultimately be able to use our ability to educate and persuade.

And the goal has to be to try to stop them and persuade them.

And we need things like the Patriot Act and electronic surveillance... (Applause)

... and interrogation.

In an earlier part of my life, I prosecuted a lot of crime—organized criminals in particular. A little bit of terrorism, but mostly organized criminals. And that would be sort of the analogy that I very often use.

And I think about it and I can never remember anybody coming into my office, knocking on my door and saying, "I want to tell you about the Gambino crime family." (Laughter)

Nobody comes in and tells you about it. You know how we found out about it? We had to intrude into their activities. We had to breach their privacy. We had to have electronic surveillance. We had to have informants—spies, if you will. We had to get into their affairs, both here and in Italy and all over the world.

And by getting into their affairs, we could find out about the murders they were planning, we could find out about the drug deals they wanted to do, we could find out about the businesses they were controlling so we could take those businesses away from them. We could find out about the unions they were controlling, and we could take those unions away from them.

This is very, very much the same thing that we have to do with terrorism, but it requires being on offense. It requires understanding that you need to the tools like the Patriot Act and legal electronic surveillance.

And you can see that the Democrats are very, very comfortable on all of this, as they are on Iraq and everything else, and they want to — and here's what I really believe they want to do: They want to go back to the way they were doing it in the 1990s, which is: Let's be on defense, let's negotiate, let's bring in the United Nations, or let's bring in France and let's bring in Germany and let's... (Chorus of Boos)

You didn't agree with that? I was shocked. (Laughter)

And we need an American president that understands the necessity of being on offense; needs to explain it to the rest of the world.

And then, finally, what we all need to do, is to understand that America has the right ideas. We should not be embarrassed about ourselves. (Applause)

We shouldn't have our heads down. (Applause)

Every single one of our problems has to be solved from our strengths. And we have great strength. We are the luckiest people in the world. We have freedom. We have democracy. We have a wonderful love of people and tremendous respect for human rights and human life, unlike any other country in the history of the world.

And we say that not out of a spirit of being better than anybody else, because we're not: We have our faults, we have our problems, and we have the things that we have to solve.

We say it out of a spirit of gratitude that we were given these great gifts. We are very fortunate people.

And it's our job—it's our job—to share it with everyone else and to move forward with the kind of vision that Ronald Reagan had; a kind of vision in which America is preserved as a shining city on a hill and a nation that will be a leader in this world, but a leader that brings us to peace and decency.

And anybody that wants to join us, anybody that wants to put down the way they were doing it before and wants to join us, you can't find a country that is more embracing than this country.

Our enemies of the Second World War are our good friends today. Our enemies of the Cold War are becoming our friends today.

And I predict to you, that if we do it right, with the spirit of America, the enemies that we think we now have in this war on terror are going to be friends of America— and we will be friends of theirs—in the future.

But we'll get there the way Ronald Reagan got us there: Peace through strength.

Thank you very much. (Applause)

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