Eight months ago Charlie Cook, a tubby political analyst, said he was more likely to win the Tour de France than Rudy Giuliani was to win the Republican presidential nomination. Many pundits agreed. Sure, Mr. Giuliani was a crime-busting mayor of New York and he famously kept his head when the twin towers fell. But he favors gun control, likes gays and does not want to ban abortion. Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, a radical anti-abortion group, calls him “Mayor Beelzebrooklyn” according to the Economist.
Yet Mr. Giuliani is still the Republican front-runner. A poll of polls compiled by Realclearpolitics.com, a political website, puts him 11 percentage points ahead of his nearest challenger, Fred Thompson, an actor and former senator. The Intrade political futures market gives him a 41% chance of winning the nomination, while his nearest challenger by this measure, Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has only a 29% chance. And a couple of recent polls showed Mr. Giuliani narrowly pipping Hillary Clinton in a general election—the first time for a while that any Republican has done so. Mr. Cook says he is thinking of working out and losing weight, just in case.
Mr. Giuliani’s supporters say he is such a fine leader that Republicans can overlook his messy private life (he is on his third marriage, and has strained relations with his children) and heretical views on abortion, gays and guns. Maybe they are right: many social conservatives also feel strongly about crime, taxes, and national security, Mr. Giuliani’s strengths.
Crime halved in New York while he was mayor. Granted, the decline began before he took over, but it accelerated under him. And granted, he should have shared more of the credit with his police chief, William Bratton, who ended up quitting New York for Los Angeles, and has slashed crime rates there. But most impartial observers think Mr. Giuliani’s “broken windows” strategy (where police arrest people for small crimes and thereby ensnare bigger criminals, who may be carrying guns or drugs when they dodge subway fares) did a lot to make a scary city safer. No other candidate of either party can make such a claim. And since most voters dislike being mugged, that matters.
Read it here: The Election: Who will take on Hillary?