Rudy Sports New Flip-Flops, and a Gun, Too!

What do you know, Rudy Giuliani has seen the light, and now opposes further gun control! What an amazing, Damascus-like conversion, and what a bizarre coincidence that it just so happened at an NRA convention in the heat of a Republican presidential-primary campaign. Whodathunk?

I begrudge no one the right to change his or her mind. There's scarcely a political issue out there on which my thinking hasn't changed, in some cases radically, over the course of my adult life. It's a function of growth that as we mature, and gain new experiences, we learn things along the way that can alter our outlook.

BUT, it's hard to take seriously campaign-trail conversions that always seem to coincide with political expediency. (Remember when, immediately after being nominated as the Democratic candidate for VP, Joe Lieberman had a sudden change of heart on affirmative action and vouchers?)

John Kerry, of course, is probably the candidate most commonly associated with "flip-flopping," and he's a classic case. Changing your mind about the war is one thing (I've done it myself). Changing your mind between primary and general elections, in a nakedly political way, is something very different. It suggests that you have no principles at all, other than winning, and that you focus on particular issues not because you care about them, but because it enables you to take advantage of passionate voters who do. (The few passionate voters remaining, that is. Most Americans have grown so cynical about all this that they have become decidedly lukewarm.) It's hard not to read Mitt Romney's abortion yoyoing as exactly the same sort of thing.

Ultimately, I think his supposed change of heart will hurt Giuliani more than it helps. Second Amendment supporters aren't stupid; they'll see through this pander. And the rest of America, which may have admired Rudy for being a "different" sort of candidate -- straightforward, unconventional -- will likely come to see him as just another politician.