Giuliani really was a hero … once.

… and it wasn't on 9/11. This is a few weeks late, but I think this is a fascinating story:

At a packed and emotional news conference in May 2000, in which he announced he was dropping out of the race for the U.S. Senate as a result of his illness, Giuliani admitted to suddenly seeing the world very differently. He said his illness had changed him and that he wanted to reach out to minority groups and the poor. Most important, he said, he had newfound respect, understanding, and empathy for the city's uninsured. It seems Giuliani couldn't feel people's pain until he, well—literally—felt people's pain. But once he had, he stated that extending health insurance coverage to more of the city's uninsured was his top goal for his remaining 18 months in office. ''One of the things that I felt from the beginning of [my illness] and continue to feel is a tremendous sense of compassion for the people that have to make decisions like this alone," he explained. "One of the things maybe that I can do is figure out how we accelerate making sure that people are covered."

And he made it so: Helping to get hundreds of thousands of kids and adults covered to the tune of $390 million over four years — to his great and enduring credit, whether he wants it or not. Giuliani now infamously campaigns against so-called "socialized medicine"; makes plainly false claims about the supposed superiority of American health care; and offers the old-time conservative religion of tax incentives and really, really "free markets" … or something.

Giuliani and other conservatives are trying to serve two masters: 1.) The problems at hand, and 2.) Conservative orthodoxy. And those two things are getting farther and farther apart, and the conservative hymns to which the Club For Growth faithful swoon seem tinnier and tinnier to everyone else's ears. Now that their six-plus years of basically unfettered rule is at and end, the GOP in general seems to be suffering a massive bout of cognitive dissonance, now that their well-loved and well-worn orthodoxies are meeting the icebergs of reality on several fronts: Health care; global warming; taxation vis-a-vis fiscal sustainability, and so on. Cognitive dissonance provides you with a choice: Either you can change your mind and your strategy; denial; or a half-hearted acknowledgment and a weak, inadequate response to the challenge.

After all, the simplest, most direct and obvious solution to the problem of health care access is to do exactly what Giuliani did in 2000: Just make it happen. Bite the bullet, spend the money, and let the chips fall where they may. Done. That tends to be the liberal approach to governance, and up to a point, it's entirely practical. You decide what set of problems you absolutely need to solve (eg. uninsurance), and what set of problems you're willing to put up with as an opportunity cost ($390 million for something else — schools, tax breaks, etc). Of course, that's anathema to conservative orthodoxy, because any opportunity cost of a forgone tax cut is verboten. And so you get the rationalizations: Not only can we not possibly spend taxpayers' money, but people who would benefit don't deserve it; it's big government; it's bureaucratic; it's inferior to the "free market" because free market approaches are by definition superior (a tautology that Jon Chait has pointed out), and so on. None of those complaints address the structural problem of those folks lacking health care, but that's the bullet that many conservatives are willing to bite: Not actually solving the problem.

I still think back to this plea for sanity from our own State Sen. Bruce Tarr in Commonwealth Mag from a few months ago, in which he pleads with fellow Republicans to become relevant again, by rolling up their sleeves and getting into the game:

Massachusetts is losing population, hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs, and becoming increasingly unaffordable for middle-class families. This is no time for monopoly control of state government by the Democrats. At the same time, problems like these ought to be a call to action for a Republican Party that too often has had its bread-and-butter economic issues drowned out by what are often more sensational, but less consequential, social issues.

… The time is now to advance innovative proposals, including those that Republican legislators have to offer. Those proposals that have merit should be well received by the governor and by the Democratic leaders of the Legislature, and form the basis for the type of collaboration that so many hope for. If not, the blame will be on them.

Tarr seems to acknowledge that his party — any party — will achieve relevance in our region if and only if they provide workable solutions to actual problems. Honest-to-God moderate Republicans can get elected anywhere — Massachusetts, New York City, California … even President, in what should be an uphill year for Republicans.

It's just that they're so hard to find these days. The natural successors to the moderate mantle — Romney and Giuliani — have sold whatever moderate cred they possessed for a mess o' reactionary pottage. As Mike Dukakis recently asked regarding Romney, "What does he actually believe in? Does anyone really know, because I certainly don’t." (HT Jay.) I don't think they'll be able to reclaim their crossover appeal, should they win their party's nomination. The things that make the GOP base tick have become just too far removed from the rest of the country.

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