Giuliani on the Issues: Reality Versus His Reality

Rudolph keeps trying to reinvent himself:

In campaigning for president, Rudolph W. Giuliani has criticized Democrats for promoting “socialized” medicine, boasted about his record as mayor of New York City for dramatically reducing public assistance, and vigorously opposed expanding government health insurance for children.

[...]in the spring of 2000, during his second term and soon after he received a diagnosis of prostate cancer, he suddenly announced that the city would embark on one of the most aggressive efforts in the country to enroll children and adults in public health programs like Medicaid and Child Health Plus, the state insurance program for children.He named his effort HealthStat, after his aggressive and widely praised crime reporting program, CompStat. He said he would follow the same course on insurance: he would root out the uninsured as he had rooted out criminals. Campaigning against his own record?

Then there is abortion:

On the campaign trail, Rudolph W. Giuliani has made the case that while he believes that abortions are wrong, he thinks the ultimate decision of whether to have them should be up to women, and not the government. But he has also pledged to appoint the kind of conservative judges who might be expected to rule against abortion.

[...]Kelli Conlon of Naral Pro-Choice New York, recalled that Mr. Giuliani had put her on his transition team when he was elected mayor and issued proclamations to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But Ms. Conlon said she was troubled to hear him say that he would appoint justices in the model of Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

[...]n his address to the Federalist Society, Mr. Giuliani spoke against racial quotas and the use of eminent domain to enrich private developers. Mr. Giuliani, a former supporter of gun control, praised a recent federal court decision overturning a gun-control law. He said that the nomination fight that blocked Judge Robert H. Bork from the Supreme Court was a “new low,” lamented “the attempted character assassination” of Justice Thomas, and said all judicial appointees should get an up-or-down vote in the Senate. And he spoke about religion in the public sphere. “I cannot figure out where some imperative exists to take the words ‘under God’ out of the Pledge of Allegiance, or to ban the mention of the 10 amendments in a public square,” he said, after discussing the Bill of Rights. Then he corrected himself: “The 10 Commandments.”The nuances of Mr. Giuliani’s position are already playing out in interesting ways.

Let's not forget the immigration issue:

A former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, is blaming Mayor Giuliani for aggravating the problem of illegal immigration by making New York into a magnet for illegal aliens when he was mayor.

"He was responsible for a sanctuary city. He did not oppose a sanctuary city. He welcomed illegal aliens to the city," Mr. Romney told reporters during a campaign swing through southern California yesterday. "That sanctuary state of mind is one of the reasons we have so many illegal aliens in our country today.