Giuliani's Twists

So, like most people I started off thinking a snowball had a better chance in hell than Rudy Giuliani did of winning the GOP presidential nomination. Then, as time passed, the snowball kept not melting and I started to, well, theorize. Watching the debate, though, it's clear that Giuliani has not, in fact, come up with a deft way to parry his vulnerability on abortion. It also comes across as even clearer that he hasn't come up with a deft way to parry his less known (at the moment) vulnerability on immigration. He just, I think, hasn't really been attacked on these grounds yet by anyone. Faced with the modest probing of the debate, however, he had nothing.

Mitt Romney, by contrast, managed to remind me a bit of why he was able to con me into voting for him 2002. Like a lot of fairly liberal Massachusetts types who must have also voted for him in that election (he won, after all) I feel once bitten twice shy about the whole thing and he now plays to me as a transparent fraud. Conservatives around the country, however, haven't had that experience and I bet he looks different to a lot of them.