Rudy Giuliani and social conservatives

A while ago I wrote a post praising Rudy Giuliani's brand of conservatism and suggesting that it could be a model for a new direction in both the Republican Party and the Conservative Party of Canada. Fellow Canadian bloggers scoffed: the always-entertaining Canadian Cynic listed my post under "Blogging Tory Inanities" and chortled:

Yeah, Eric, why don't you promote Rudy Guiliani as a presidential candidate? I'd love to see how that turns out.

Suzanne over at Big Blue Wave wrote "if Republicans nominate Guiliani, they will lose". She had this to say:

Diogenes Borealis suggests that the Republicans would do well to allow Giuliani to be nominated as the Presidential candidate.If the Republicans don't nominate a pro-lifer, they will lose. The so-con base is not going to move mountains the way they did for George Bush for some guy who is not nearly as pro-life as he is.

Well, we'll see about that. John Hinderaker has a post today at Powerline called Can Giuliani Win Over Social Conservatives? He writes:

A couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Rudy Giuliani would be a formidable Presidential candidate, but could never get the Republican nomination because of his liberal views on some social issues. I believe that we were among the first to question this assumption, noting that Giuliani is conservative on some social issues (notably, crime) and, more important, could win the support of a broad range of Republicans by putting the key social issues in procedural terms: I may be a New Yorker and more liberal on these topics than most Republicans, but I think issues like gay marriage and abortion should be resolved by through the democratic process, and I will appoint strict constructionist judges to the federal courts--which really, after all, is the only significant thing the President has to do with the social issues.

Giuliani has taken a course much like what we hypothesized, and there has been a lot of publicity lately about surveys that seem to show him doing well with the GOP's conservative base.

I still think Giuliani can win the Republican nomination, and social conservatives will by and large support him because he may be the party's best chance of beating the Democrats. The alternative is President Hillary Clinton. Who is more distasteful to social conservatives? Exactly.