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Rudy's Big QuestionIs Giuliani too liberal for the GOP? Probably not. Here's why.

By John DickersonUpdated Thursday, May 24, 2007, at 2:52 PM ET

This is the first in a series of articles exploring the key question facing each presidential candidate.

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Evangelical leaders have self-interested reasons for wanting to foil Rudy. If Giuliani is elected without them, they'll have little clout with the new administration. That's just one way in which the mayor's candidacy re-ignites a longstanding intramural fight within the GOP coalition. Fiscal and national-security conservatives have long groused about the outsized influence of the party's moralizing wing. Social conservatives complain that they are courted only during elections and forgotten afterwards.

Despite the churn, Giuliani's drop in the polls isn't likely to lead to a freefall. He's very conservative on national security and economic issues. If people want to feel safe in a dangerous world, he's still their pick. He beats up on Democrats in a way that makes dispirited conservatives cheer. He's also not the libertine his opponents would claim. He took strong stands in the culture wars, fighting to force the porn shops out of Times Square (they're back) and forcing the removal of a painting at the Brooklyn Museum of the Virgin Mary that also featured elephant dung and cutouts from pornographic magazines. He became a GOP icon in the '90s for using conservative principles to attack crime and social pathologies in New York. This is why Giuliani's liberal positions don't constitute the mortal danger they would be to other candidates.

Social-conservative leaders are making threats, but they may not have the power they think they do. After the attacks of 9/11, many conservatives may have shifted their priorities beyond their traditional moral focus. "There has been a false sense of the importance of social conservatives," says Bush's former pollster Matthew Dowd. "We learned in 2000 and 2004 the drivers among conservatives and social conservatives didn't have anything to do with social issues. Iraq, taxes, and national security all superseded social issues."

To spoil Giuliani's reputation as the strongest GOP candidate in a general election, Dobson and Land have said they won't vote for him in November 2008. They've warned that evangelicals will stay home too. That's unlikely, say several unaffiliated veterans from the last GOP campaigns I talked to. The next president will probably have a chance to nominate two Supreme Court justices. Conservatives won't want a Democrat making those picks, particularly if it's Hillary Clinton. Giuliani made this point explicitly in a recent debate when he responded to a question about abortion by saying the more important concern for the party was how they were going to beat the former first lady.

The Giuliani campaign will continue to answer questions about social issues by changing the subject and stressing his record as mayor, prosecutor, and member of the Reagan Justice Department. The campaign of deflection might win him enough votes, but it won't do away with the heated debate among conservatives any more than standing up for the Yankees cooled off Dodger fans in his old neighborhood.