Among politics-watchers (and the Giuliani campaign particularly) there’s a meme floating around that holds that Rudy Giuliani can overcome conservative resistance to his social liberalism and/or social issue flip-flops by emphasizing what I guess you’d call the leadership principle and his diehard support for War on Terrorism and the Iraq War.
That makes sense to the extent that most of Rudy’s potential Red state audience doesn’t know much about him beyond the 9/11 hagiography. And it makes more sense to the extent that that focus can separate the ‘War on Terror’ from the War in Iraq — something conservatives have never liked doing.
But there seems to be a basic problem built in to this idea. Do Republicans really want to go into 2008 with a presidential candidacy whose raison d’etre is diehard support for the Iraq War and President Bush’s version of the War on Terror, which it would inevitably be? That sounds like perilous political territory on multiple counts unless a lot changes over the next eighteen months.
