Pandering

Greg Sargent flags this article from the St. Louis Post Dispatch in which Rudy caught shamelessly demagoguing:

He promised to end “overspending by government, overtaxing by government, overregulating by government and oversuing” by Americans.

To cut government spending, Giuliani promised to replace only half of the federal workers expected to retire over the next eight to 10 years. He promised to retain the tax cuts put in place by the Bush administration. Those two actions, he said, would require that average Americans take more responsibility for their lives.

Because he's a Republican and, more specifically, because he's Rudy Giuliani, presumably he's referring to non-Defense employees, and presumably, again because he's a Republican, he'd target federal jobs in agencies like the Department of Labor where we desperately need more, not fewer employees. But what's really annoying about this is that the figure "one-half" is obviously totally arbitrary. For whatever it's worth, when Ron Paul talks about downsizing the government, he gets specific. He, for reasons that I don't know and certainly wouldn't agree with, wants to dismantle the Department of Education. It may be seriously wrongheaded, but at least it's motivated by a genuine underlying belief: The Department of Education is unnecessary.

Rudy, meanwhile, is just making arbitrary gestures to constituencies he thinks will be happy to hear that he'll leave "half" of all vacated federal positions unfilled, without any regard to whether the affected agencies' functions are necessary or popular or whether a blindfolded slashing like this will harm peoples' lives, and no doubt nobody in the mainstream media will meaningfully question the wisdom of this.