Sorry, I can't see Rudy having any chance whatsoever at getting the nomination. People may have heard that he's divorced, but once they hear the gruesome details about his personal life and what an ass he has been, it will hurt him.

The shady business dealings involving Kerik and others won't help either. The other Republicans are not going to hand Rudy the nomination on a plate. They will use whatever they need to use.

And I still think his strong and loud pro-choice record will hurt him. He has backed public funding for abortions in the past. It just won't fly.

I think one of the second-tier socially conservative Republican candidates is going to break out of the pack and win the nomination. I don't know who it will be yet, but I'd put money on several of those guys over Rudy to be the GOP nominee.

Good think McCain is crashing. I was worried about facing him in the general, given how the media fall all over themselves to praise him.

Third party or independent run is a real possibility if the GOP is really so deeply split.

I think a Clinton/Giuliani head to head would be interesting and gives me the most pause.  To many he is the 9/11 heroic mayor and unless McCain does enough to blow up that concept, the general population may eat him up.  I give him the edge especially if the Anti-Hillary Dem voters decide to sit out the general.  I don't think SOCONS will sit out a Giuliani election if it means  putting Hillary in as POTUS. I also don't know how effective the Hillary camp would be in kneecapping Giuliani, who cannot be painted with the "vast right wing conspiracy" brush.

IMO a Giuliani/Obama head to head, would favor Obama. He is a saint in comparison to Rudy and Obama does this "person of faith" deal that may get SOCONS to cross the party line.

I don't really have a feel for a Giuliani/Edwards match up.  From all the polling, Edwards doesn't seem to be inspiring a lot of passion, be it like or dislike.  I know he is the net roots favorite, but outside of the net he seems to have trouble getting the attention of the average voter.

All said, I think we should be focusing our attention on beating back a Rudy nomination.  McCain is a has been.

Consider, for example, that only a little over 60% of Bush voters self-identified as pro-choice in both 2000 and 2004.

I assume you mean that 60% of Bush voters identified as pro-life.  Otherwise the paragraph doesn't make sense to me.  Yes?

We should start always asking the question, "do you think that Giuliani and Newt will be able to stay with their third wives for the whole campaign ?"

I am having a hard time understanding the whole Giuliani thing.  I mean, I know Republicans like him because he bites into the whole neocon thing pretty hard.  But are they not even aware of his record on, say, gun control?  Where the hell is the NRA?

Seriously, is the right really going to up and surrender on gays, guns, abortion, stem cells, and pretty much every other social conservative hobby-horse in exchange for "the 9/11 mayor"?  Some of his social positions put him to the left of John Kerry. The theocons are going to be OK with that?

   A Giuliani/Clinton match-up would make me die a little bit inside.  That would be a low turnout election for the ages.  I think it probably won't happen.  At least one of the parties will pick a candidate more in line with the ideological base.  I don't pretend to understand why Giuliani is the front-runner.  Why would Republicans want a pro-war, social liberal, corporatist?  It seems topsy-turvy to me.  I would have expected them to choose a big business, social conservative who is against the Iraq War (Brownback).  I think registered Republicans have drank the Iraq War Kool-Aid more than I even imagined.  Crazy.  If Giuliani wins, I think we can finally declare that big business runs the Republican party.

Don't think for a second that the Theocons won't put up one of their own as an independent/3rd party candidate to torpedo the R's if Rudy gets the nod.  Faced with the prospect of a Rudy victory, and a Republican administration which owes them nothing, and with no political home anywhere else on the dial, Dobson and friends almost have to run their own candidate, throwing the election to the D's, and forcing the GOP to come crawling back to church in the next cycle.

McCain still scares me. I have P.T.S.D. from 2000 when I thought W. was tanking. I couldn't believe that he would be elected [which he wasn't]. But never underestimate the Bible thumpers.

Maybe we coulds hire Karl Rove. He took McCain out in a heartbeat last time...

I'd love to see the eventual Democratic nominee run against a 72 year old man that supports escalation in Iraq and who openly says he wants Roe overturned.

Edwards, Obama, Hillary  ... Any of them would win going away under such circumstances.

McCain has hired the Swift Boat crew and a bunch of the nastiest campaign operatives he could find including the ones who destroyed him in 2000. My bet is that he'll go after Rudy hammer and tongs, more so when he realizes he's losing ground.

There is so much dirt in Rudy's history he won't survive and the tough guy image will be turned around on him. Guaranteed. But that doesn't man McCain will then have a resurgence and rise to the front again. My thought is that Rudy and St. John will beat each other up so badly that a third candidate will arise from the mud and trump them both. I doubt it will be Romney, either. My guess right now is Huckabee, whom we have to watch out for in '08.

   Does that mean you will be doing internet search engine optimization for Giuliani?

Do you have polls that show theocon candidates like Brownback or Huckabee are losing support, or not in a position to gain defectors from McCain and Romney? Otherwise, your title reference to theocons is confusing. McCain doesn't own them, no matter how much he sucks up, and Giuliani isn't the only alternative.

 My parents are both theocon Republicans. Whenever we get together they ALWAYS try to bait me politically, and last Saturday was no exception. This time I took the opportunity to turn the tables and told them that "at least I know you'll never support Giuliani, given his personal history". I was fishing to see what kinds of mental gymnastics and rationalizations religious wingnuts would come up with to justify voting for Rudy Giuliani. My parents did not disappoint.

 "He's admitted he's made mistakes. He's grown in his faith."

 "He now admits he was wrong about abortion. He's seen the light."

 "He's shown contrition. And anyway, the divorces were his wives' fault."

 "He doesn't try to parse his way out of it like Clinton did."

  You get the idea.

  The thought that maybe all this sudden "contrition" might have an ever-so-slight correlation with his decision to run for president registers in their minds not at all.

  I don't think Giuliani would have the slightest problem attracting the theocon vote. These people can rationalize anything. If James Dobson signals that Giuliani is OK, they'll vote for him in droves. Even if Giuliani is caught in bed with an underage male stripper.

  For fundies, religion is a political club to swing, not an expression of faith in a higher power.

[McCain] speaking before creationist conferences

Just to note: This is not true as you've worded it. If this about the thing with McCain giving a "keynote" for the Discovery Institute, I saw the Think Progress article on that too, and it was wrong-- it was an exaggeration of a Discovery Institute press release, which was itself an exaggeration of reality.

What is in fact happening, as you'll see if you look at the main page for the event here, is that this Friday McCain is giving some kind of fundraiser talk/lunch in Seattle presented by "the World Affairs Council and CityClub", and co-presented by nine other organizations, one of which is the Discovery Institute. Boeing and some health insurance group are also listed as sponsors, and the focus of the talk as presented on that page appears to be foreign policy.

Now, it is definitely a good idea to press McCain on why he is giving a talk copresented by the organization that represents the vanguard of creationism and the entirety of the "intelligent design" movement. It surely reflects poorly on McCain to have this level of association with such an extreme organization. But if you present this incident as McCain "speaking before creationist conferences", you undercut yourself, because this simply isn't the case.

Of course, if the event this friday isn't what you're referring to and there was an incident where McCain spoke before a creationist conference, then I'd be incredibly curious to know about it.

Giuliani would be much harder to beat in the general. Unlike McCain, he's not sucking up to theocons in such a visceral manner (he's sucking up, but not publicly adopting their issues).  Giuliani would be much more acceptable to social moderates, and he isn't nearly as tainted by the war.

It's good that McCain is tanking, (and I'm amazed that people are paying attention this early.) but I would rather see a Dem go up against McCain the Giuliani

Giuliani scares me more than McCain. He's less associated with the disaster that is Bush, less tarred by the monstrosity that is the Iraq war, more socially moderate, and not in as much of a lock-step with the Republican party. So disgruntled Republicans and independent voters who hate Bush would be more likely to go out to vote for Giuliani than McCain.

Plus, the neocons don't like McCain anyway, so if McCain wins the nomination, it's no victory for them.

The only silver lining I'm seeing is that somebody like Tancredo would be more likely to jump in as a 3rd-party candidate against Giuliani, whereas he'll stay out of it if it's McCain. But I think it's likely he'll stay out of it anyway. Those Republicans are mighty hierarchical.

I really think any of our guys takes McCain in a walk. We have so much stuff to use against him, his popularity's down, he's not well liked among Republican activists, he looks REALLY old these days, and he just stapled this surge to his own forehead. I hope it's him, personally.

I think the points about Republican authoritarian tendencies are right on the money. Giuliani projects the perfect strong authoritarian image. Any of the ugly realities about the mistakes he made before or after 9/11 will be completely overwhelmed by the hero narrative, especially in contrast to Bush's pathetic response. His dictatorial, insensitive leadership of NYC will be viewed as a strength by the right as much as it is viewed as making him tempermentally unsuitable by the left. Theocons will happily ignore the social issues and his complex marital history because theocons are are driven by tribalism and not by theology or morality.

I've lived in NYC under Giuliani. In 1993, the continuing perception of an ungovernable city run by squeegee men made someone like Giuliani perfect for the situation. By 1997 the economy was great and, frankly, the Democratic machine candidate was so uninspiring that there wasn't much of a reason not to vote for Giuliani, which, I must reluctantly admit, I did. I wasn't directly affected by the negative stuff he did, and that's no excuse, but it's the way I felt at the time.

All that being said, it's McCain's turn (think Dole 1996) and, barring any unforseen occurances, the establishment will salute and line up, leading their authoritarian apostles in formation behind them. I think the only question is whether the Giuliani myth is stronger in the mind of the Republican primary electorate than the McCain myth. The facts won't matter.

In the general against Giuliani, it's hard to know who the best Dem would be. Richardson is obviously the best qualified, but given his unfortunate lack of charisma, it would be a replay of Eisenhower/Stevensen. Once HRC unleashed the slime machine, it would be a replay of 1998 with Giuliani ironically playing the martyr all the way to the White House. Edwards and Obama talk a great game, but they haven't actually done anything like run a major city so the question would be whether they could generate enough enthusiasm on the left to counter the right's instinctive genuflecting before Saint Rudy.

That's why my money is on Wes Clark.