Right Side of the Rainbow

New York Sun:

Mayor Giuliani is calling on the Republican Party to redefine itself as “the party of freedom,” focusing on lower taxes, school choice, and a health care system rooted in free market principles.

Delivering a policy-driven overview of his presidential platform yesterday, Mr. Giuliani outlined the agenda in a Washington speech before a conservative think tank that sought to make clear distinctions between his vision and that of the Democrats, if not his rivals for the Republican nomination in 2008. The former New York mayor’s proposed redefinition of the Republican platform would signal a shift away from any focus on social issues, on which Mr. Giuliani is much less ideologically aligned with the party.

[…]

More than 200 scholars from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution greeted Mr. Giuliani warmly, but a few had pointed questions for him. One audience member asked him to respond to a “deep concern” that his background as a mayor had given him little experience in foreign policy.

“What makes you think that the mayor of New York City doesn’t need a foreign policy?” Mr. Giuliani shot back, drawing a roar of laughter and applause from the luncheon crowd.

Giuliani said it’s an analytical error to define our fight with terrorists as a war on terrorism; it is, he said, a “war of the terrorists against us.”

Rudy appears today at a fundraiser for the state Republican Party in Virginia and on Friday he’ll address the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.