Rudy Moves Right

Clarification Appended: February 8, 2007

Rudy Giuliani trots out a joke when people ask how someone like him--a thrice-married New Yorker who supports gun control, abortion rights and gay rights and who shared an apartment during his second divorce with a couple of gay guys and a Shih Tzu named Bonnie--could possibly win the Republican presidential nomination. "Of course there are disagreements," he'll say. "You never agree with any one candidate 100%. I don't agree with myself 100%."

It's not much of a joke, but then Giuliani's predicament is no laughing matter. The former New York City mayor is at or near the top of the national polls, thanks to a heroic image forged in the fires of 9/11 (he was TIME's Person of the Year for 2001). And with John McCain's call for a supersurge in Iraq putting the Arizona Senator out of step with public opinion, the ground may be shifting toward Giuliani, who supports the Bush surge yet also sends the vague signal that "we've got to get beyond Iraq." The problem is, most Republican voters have no idea where Giuliani stands on social issues--and the conventional wisdom holds that once they find out, his candidacy will die. "It's one of those oddities," says a senior Giuliani adviser. "We're ahead in the polls, but we 'can't win.' Hey, we don't mind being the underdog."

As Giuliani gets set to enter the race--he has filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)--the right is stepping up its attacks. Tony Perkins, president of the Christian-right Family Research Council, has called him "unacceptable" and "far outside the mainstream of conservative thought." The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry's trade association, predicted that Giuliani's gun-control record (he backed the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban and the Brady Bill, and in 2000 he filed a lawsuit to hold gunmakers responsible for criminal misuse of their products) will "surely handicap him ... particularly during the Southern primaries."

But Giuliani is starting to show how he plans to blunt those attacks--by disagreeing with himself, if only a little bit. He isn't abandoning his liberal social positions, the way his rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts Governor, has, but he is undercutting them by talking up conservative nuances and qualifiers that weren't always on display when he was mayor of New York City. He's not interested in waging a culture war; in fact, he's paving over the battle lines in the hope that his leadership in another war--the war on terrorism--will carry him to the nomination.

In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, for example, Giuliani said, "I hate ... abortion ... However, I believe in a woman's right to choose." He then went on to say he would nominate Supreme Court Justices "very similar to, if not exactly the same as," conservatives John Roberts and Samuel Alito--in other words, he would be the most antiabortion "pro-choice" President in history. As for Roe v. Wade, "That's up to the court to decide." It's a mirror image of George W. Bush's formulation in 2000, when the candidate tried to reassure moderates by signaling that he opposed Roe but wouldn't actually try to overturn it. This time the candidate supports the intent of Roe but would choose Justices likely to limit or overthrow it. Talk about disagreeing with yourself.