Optimism

I am not solidly behind any one candidate at this time. There are some issues that I strongly disagree on with Rudy Giuliani.

But I do like his pension to be straightforward and appreciate his optimism. I wish more of the candidates would display this kind of attitude.

James Taranto writes today in WSJ's Opinion Journal about Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani to America: Get Real

WASHINGTON--This column makes no secret that we are favorably disposed toward Rudy Giuliani (although we value our independence and thus are grateful to Ramesh Ponnuru for leaving us off his list of pundits who are in the tank for the former mayor). Friday found us at the Federalist Society's annual National Lawyers Conference, where Giuliani delivered a 45-minute address. His speech has drawn a fair amount of commentary, but what most struck us was something he said toward the end:

I get very, very frustrated when I . . . hear certain Americans talk about how difficult the problems we face are, how overwhelming they are, what a dangerous era we live in. I think we've lost perspective. We've always had difficult problems, we've always had great challenges, and we've always lived in danger.

Do we think our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents didn't live in danger and didn't have difficult problems? Do we think the Second World War was less difficult that our struggle with Islamic terrorism? Do we think that the Great Depression was a less difficult economic struggle for people to face than the struggles we're facing now? Have we entirely lost perspective of the great challenges America has faced in the past and has been able to overcome and overcome brilliantly? I think sometimes we have lost that perspective.

Do you know what leadership is all about? Leadership is all about restoring that perspective that this country is truly an exceptional country that has great things that it is going to accomplish in the future that will be as great and maybe even greater than the ones we've accomplished in the past. If we can't do that, shame on us.

This is exactly right, and we hope Giuliani keeps hammering home the point. In the conservative circles in which we usually travel, we hear far too much depressive, alarmist talk.

And the left is much worse. They are so scared of terrorism that they have constructed an elaborate system of denial. They lash out at anyone who takes the terror threat seriously (see Glenn Greenwald's silly attack on the Giuliani speech for an example), but their complacency is obviously phony, as evidenced by their lurid and obsessive fantasies about torture, tyranny, global warming and all other manner of unreal horrors.

Giuliani also made what appears an effort to evoke Ronald Reagan:
Every single problem that I solved in New York City that people thought were impossible to solve, I solved it because I'm an optimist, because I refuse to accept defeat, because I refuse to accept that intelligent people with the kind of advantages we've been given can't solve any problem that we're faced with.

Reagan was frequently described as an optimist, in contrast with those who thought that America was on the decline and that communism was both invincible and not really all that threatening. But Reagan's "optimism" turned out to be realism, as did Giuliani's, at least in New York City.