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Forgive a latecomer to this rather upsetting thread - I know it's late for you and you'll probably not get this until the morning, but I have a hunch this thread will still be going by then.

Your candidate has a problem that invoking the magic phrase "front-running status" is unlikely to cure, in my opinion. That is simply this - in American politics for the last four decades or so there were two hot-button issues, abortion and gun control, and in the last decade or so a third has been added - illegal immigration. The problem is that Rudy has either temporized or come down on the wrong side (for conservatives) on each of these.

These are hot-button issues for liberals as well, and hence there tends to be very little middle ground, and a politician who strives to find it ends up respected by neither of the polarities. The Excluded Middle may be a fallacy in logic but it's a political fact. And it turns out that claiming their candidate's strength on national security while ignoring the fact that two of these issues, gun control and illegal immigration, are intimately associated with national security, is going to be a very difficult rock for Rudy's people - I assume you are one of them - to try to move out of the road.

I don't think they're likely to manage it, and that, plus quite a bit of unwarranted heat, is what this thread is about. I think that Giuliani is profoundly untrustworthy on each of these issues, and were it to come to a choice between him and Hillary the election will, in the view of many conservatives, come down to a choice between a woman who will take our rights away and a man who will deal them away. That's a pretty ugly choice. Some of us are unenthusiastic about such a choice but not, I think, unreasonable.