King Kong versus Godzilla
By Carol Devine-Molin (10/23/07)
Pollster Frank Luntz, a regular on the Sean Hannity radio program, provides incisive analysis on the presidential debates. Regarding the October 21st GOP debate, Luntz indicated, that from among the Republican presidential hopefuls, the Republican focus group clearly wanted Rudolph Giuliani to be the one to take the fight to Hillary Clinton in 2008.
According to Luntz, they liked Giuliani’s prosecutorial skills that are akin to debate skills, his image as a “fighter”, and his toughness in the New York mold. The Republican focus group was also delighted with Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. However, none have the combative edge honed by Giuliani during his tenure as mayor of New York City, exemplified by his well known battles with tabloids and a plethora of adversaries. Apparently, Republicans know what they want in a gladiator that will not only have to get into the arena with Hillary, but with the rest of the Clinton gang as well.
This dovetails with my view that America never got over being deprived of the Rudy and Hillary New York Senate showdown of 2000, also known as King Kong versus Godzilla (or better yet, Hildabeast). Americans have a sense that it’s nothing less than kismet, and these two from opposing camps are meant to battle it out.
Clearly, we live in a politically polarized nation that’s hankering for that knock-down, drag-out fight between two great warring factions of our era, the free-market Republicans – believers in freedom, opportunity, and the American constitution – versus the socialist Democrats that embrace the Nanny state, government control, and the enabling of America’s enemies.
Moreover, this harkens back to remarks made by American Spectator’s Bob Tyrell in recent years. Essentially, he sees a politically bifurcated baby-boomer generation - the conservatives and the liberals - heading toward a final confrontation on values and politics. The outcome of this epic struggle will determine America’s fate in the 21st century.
But there’s another generation that’s pivotal to this discussion, which is fighting the war-on-terror in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world. It’s the Millennial generation, born 1980--2000. For those that believe in generation theory (four archetypical generations that keep repeating), Millennials are a “fourth turning” generation, cast in the “Hero” archetype, that enter young adulthood during crisis times. The last time America saw “the fourth turning” was during World War II, which of course produced “the greatest generation”. This is not reincarnation; this represents sociological and cultural patterns that have persisted throughout American history.
To continue, these young Millennial soldiers are fighting the good fight against global Jihad, and they’ll turn out far better than we baby-boomers. That being said, the conservative Millennials have a special bond with conservative baby-boomers. While these young men and women are fighting actual wars, the conservatives of my generation are their support team so-to-speak, the right-leaning political and culture warriors in America. Baby-boomer Rush Limbaugh is a great inspiration to these conservative Millennials. But I digress. Now back to the subject of Rudy Giuliani.
Any fair-minded person would have to concede that Giuliani’s on-the-job performance as a fiscal conservative and law-and-order mayor was nothing less than spectacular. It’s also significant that he fought liberal opponents with alacrity, including well known demagogues and the education bureaucracy. Here in the New York metropolitan region, we had first hand experience with the so-called “ungovernable” city, we read the daily papers and we watched the local news. Giuliani’s tenacity, physical stamina, intelligence and character were readily manifest. Moreover, Rudy doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about political correctness. During the mid-1990s, he had Yasser Arafat thrown out of a big event at Lincoln Center and ordered police not to let him out of the Turtle Bay area where he was ensconced with the diplomats. Giuliani wasn’t going to have that murderous thug Arafat traipsing around NYC.
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