Rudy Returns

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American Spectator:

Former New York City mayor and early 2008 Republican presidential frontrunner Rudy Giuliani is back in the spotlight during the current presidential campaign, acting as a Mitt Romney surrogate in Florida. Rumored to be working behind-the-scenes on a new Super PAC with Sheldon Adelson (and thus joining fellow Republican legends Karl Rove of Crossroads GPS and Dick Armey of FreedomWorks in the realm of conservative political organizing), Giuliani has been taking an increasingly public role in the Romney campaign.

His growing visibility makes sense given the issues at stake in this election, and raises an important question: Will Rudy Giuliani speak at this month's Republican National Convention in Tampa?

Giuliani spoke at Republican Party state headquarters in Tampa in late July, pumping up a crowd by calling Obama "anti-business, anti-profit."

Giuliani has been pitching his protégé Marco Rubio as "the most exciting" Romney vice-presidential candidate, and apparently he has enough pull in Romney-world that he can tell interviewers that Romney will pass immigration reform if elected president.

"I guarantee you that if we elect Mitt Romney, our economy next year will boom," said Giuliani.

During an April appearance on Fox and Friends, Giuliani defended Romney from charges that the former Massachusetts governor is not likable enough to win an election against President Obama. "When I had to be operated on for prostate cancer," Rudy said, "I didn't go to the nicest doctor. I went to the best doctor."

Giuliani's forthright manner and fiscal record both fit in with the recent tone of the Romney campaign.

In recent weeks, we've seen delightfully blunt East Coaster John Sununu straight-talk around the country as a Romney surrogate. We've heard Romney tell Harry Reid to "put up or shut up" about his tax returns. We've watched Romney tout his Bay State spending cuts and four straight balanced budgets (with an 85 percent Democratic legislature, no less) in a recent campaign ad.

As a proponent of "aggressive capitalism" and the first Republican mayor of New York since liberal John Lindsay, Giuliani may finally be an unequivocal messaging asset to national Republican efforts. Or to put it perhaps more accurately, the Republican establishment may have finally caught up to Rudy.

Properly decorated for his service to New York after 9/11 and long associated with his aggressive push to stop violent crime, Giuliani's fiscal conservatism has often been overlooked by conservatives who listen to his accent and deem him a RINO. But in the decade before George W. Bush doubled the size of the federal budget, Giuliani was pushing through the kind of policies in his city that conservatives ostensibly built their movement upon.