The Opinionator: Is Rudy Toast?

NYT

In a matter of hours, the commentariat shifted from speculating that Rudy Giuliani is the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination to wondering if his campaign just self-destructed. By telling CNN’s Dana Bash that he supports taxpayer funding for some abortions, “Rudy Giuliani is in the process of bungling a very delicate effort he was managing brilliantly before last week — making what might be considered a grande-entente with social conservatives,” John Podhoretz writes at National Review’s The Corner. At the same blog, Yuval Levin, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, writes:

It’s of course hard to say how lasting the effect of Giuliani’s comments about abortion and his understanding of “strict constructionist” this week will be, but judging by the DC social conservative types I’ve talked to in the past 24 hours (some of whom had been quite open to Rudy before) I have to say it looks like this will hurt him quite seriously in those quarters. That was never his constituency, of course, and DC types don’t speak for social conservatives across the country, but as JPod said, Giuliani had been trying to manage a careful game with them to keep them open minded. That game might be ending.

The episode makes Ross Douthat wonder, “Does Rudy really want to be president?” Douthat, an associate editor at The Atlantic, writes at The American Scene: Giuliani, “who can be a potent contender if he works out smart answers to the various inconvenient questions awaiting him, has instead decided that he’s Rudy Giuliani, damn it, and the G.O.P. can bloody well change to suit him rather than the other way around.”

Robert George, an editorial writer at The New York Post, points out on Ragged Thots, his personal blog, that Giuliani’s position puts him to the left of Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of Daily Kos.

Centrist Democrat Ed Kilgore, writing at his NewDonkey.com blog, theorizes that Rudy didn’t really understand the subtleties of abortion politics when he spoke off-the-cuff. “What interests me is whether Giuliani fully understood the political implications of his interview with Bash,” Kilgore writes. “If he did, I guess you have to admire his suicidal chutzpah.”