Dear cicero's_son,
"I AM pro-life,..."
That's great! Were you at the March yesterday?
"Rudy is going to make peace with reasonable Right to Lifers."
Unless Mr. Giuliani persuasively and convincingly renounces his belief that Roe was rightly decided, that abortion is a real constitutional right, I know many committed pro-lifers who will not vote for Mr. Giuliani.
I'm one of them.
I've never actually not voted for a Republican before. Except the time that the Nation of Islam guy was running as a Republican for the US House in Maryland's Fifth District, and his unofficial campaign slogan was "Kill Honky." But other than that, it's been straight ticket "R" voting from 1978 to the present day. For every office. Without exception. In every single election for which I've been eligible to vote since 1978.
Heck, I even gave money to BOB DOLE'S campaign.
It'll feel very, very strange, as I've never not voted for the Republican candidate for president, and I am pretty much a party-line voter.
All that being said, I will not vote for a pro-abort for president.
If Mr. Giuliani is the nominee, I don't think he'll win. Although I believe that many social conservatives will vote for him, many won't. He won't hold enough of the base.
I also don't think he'll have much pull from the other side. Although there are probably lots of liberals and Democrats who might usually think of voting for a pro-death Republican, most of these folks are against the war. I don't think that they'll vote for the individual who will be most identified with the war, aside from Mr. Bush, himself.
In that most folks, unfortunately, are pretty much now against the war, I'm not sure that choosing one of the most hawkish candidates in our party will be a big winner in 2008.
However, I never thought that America would elect a peanut farmer, or an obvious fraud from Arkansas, either, so Mr. Giuliani might win without some segment of the social conservative vote.
Never say never.
But although you claim to be a pro-lifer, you seem to misunderstand what the movement is really about. We don't necessarily believe that we are going to win anything soon, even though we believe that we will win eventually. We don't necessarily believe that the Republicans can't survive without us, even if we are skeptical that they can.
It's quite possible that persons like you will succeed in kicking pro-lifers to the curb.
Here's something that I posted today. It may give you some sense of what most folks feel who bother to protest outside abortuaries, or who march on Washington every January:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1772232/posts
sitetest
I'll stack my pro-life credentials up against anyone on this board.
The fact is that the President can only do one meaningful thing for pro-lifers: appoint pro-life, constructionist judges.
Guiliani has said that Scalia would be his model for a Supreme Court justice. That is good enough for me. It should be good enough for any pro-lifer who wants to see actual progress in our struggle.
Unfortunately, we have a few Unappeasables on this board who are more interested in ritual purity than real progress. I have nothing but contempt for them.