Giuliani's Policy Professor

For Simon, Giuliani's record as mayor described a pragmatist who didn't enjoy just a casual affinity with grass-roots conservatives because they both hated liberals -- he was also a thinker for whom pragmatism and an instinctual conservatism were intertwined. "It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing," Simon said when asked whether he believes Giuliani is a conservative by ideological conviction or came to his politics through the process of governing. "But both of those two lines are there."

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The Simon University seminars that the policy mavens helped put together to refine Giuliani's conservative sensibilities were designed to mirror sessions Giuliani had sat through 15 years earlier, between his first, failed run for mayor of New York and his second, successful one.

Those sessions helped turn Giuliani into an innovative pragmatist as mayor, an empiricist who leaned on new technologies to help dramatically reduce crime and presided over a new urban prosperity.

But with Giuliani unlikely now to attract many conservative voters through his positions on social issues, Simon and the Giuliani campaign have tried, with some success, to suggest that his record in New York reveals a conservative's instincts.

On the stump, a few quiet accomplishments from Giuliani's eight years as mayor have been widely aired: The campaign has emphasized the decline in the number of abortions in New York while he was mayor. And the candidate has spoken frequently, and with a supply-side feeling, about the results of his cut in the hotel occupancy tax -- a move, he says, that helped fill hotels and thus drove up the city's revenue from the tax.

The hotel occupancy tax is a good sale for conservatives because it was a "miniature supply-side experiment," Norquist said. "I like people who can explain to you why they did it and why it worked, and Giuliani can." This presentation of Giuliani's record has also won him accolades from the conservative Club for Growth.

But if this presentation of Giuliani, a fiscal conservative with some socially conservative leanings, has worked in some circles in Washington, it has struck many New York insiders as something between a moderately misleading recasting of his record and naked spin.

Fran Reiter, a New York operative who managed Giuliani's mayoral reelection campaign, broke with him last month, signing on with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). "He took a political turn to the right -- clearly," Reiter said at the time.

Others say Giuliani's current positioning is out of touch with the reality of his governance. The nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission -- a business-backed watchdog group in New York -- recently put out a report highly critical of Giuliani's performance. It found that though his term as mayor coincided with a tremendous economic boom in the city, he left a larger budget deficit in his last year than his predecessor, Democrat David N. Dinkins, had left him. The group says he cut too-generous deals with municipal unions and failed most fiscal conservative tests.

"This idea that he was squeezing blood out of a stone is completely ridiculous," said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Other observers say a close examination of Giuliani's record in New York reveals a man whose economic policy, in the words of Jonathan Bowles, "almost exclusively focused on providing discretionary tax breaks to a small number of the largest corporations," rather than the broad tax simplification and supply-side sensibility he now endorses.

Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, found that Giuliani gave more than 70 tax breaks to individual companies in order to keep them in New York, "even though some said openly they would not have left if they had not gotten the tax breaks."

Steering the Campaign

These days, Simon divides his time between California -- where his investment firm is, and where he is chair of the state's Giuliani campaign -- and New York, at campaign headquarters. Every Monday, he hosts a call during which a few senior members of the campaign staff -- Stephen Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis; John Avlon, Simon's deputy; and Piereson -- go over policies and speeches in development.