Rudi is a great candidate if your goal is to elect anybody with an "R" next to his name. He is a horrible candidate if you want to elect a Conservative.
How about a Rudy/Newt ticket?
Concerning "Guiliani is a great candidate if you want to elect a Republican, and a poor candidate if you want to elect a conservative ..."
There is a tiny, little problem, with saying I don't like the realistic choices, I want an unrealistic choice.
During the 1990s, the Republicans gained a solid majority consisting of a mix of social conservatives, economic conservatives and security conservatives.
In 2000, G.W. Bush was elected president, defeating the candidate of the incumbent party in spite of peace and a vibrant economy, because the Republican Party's underlying majority and, of course, Bill Clinton's shortcomings as a man. In that year, I don't remember G.W. Bush saying he was going to get us into a protracted war in Iraq, or build a fence between us and Mexico, or ratchet the war on drugs up a notch.
I remember G.W. Bush saying we shouldn't get involved in nation-building, we should have comprehensive immigration reform, and we should respect state laws on medical marijuana.
I could get into a long list of other positions, such as privatizing social security, reforming our income tax code, parental choice in education, changing the culture so that we celebrate life instead of death, and defending traditional marriage while respecting the equal rights of all Americans.
I think the package of things had enough to appeal to all of the constituent factions of the Republican Party that each faction could accept what they didn't like in the package.
But, with the continuing war in Iraq, we have lost our majority; and, we haven't quite delivered enough of the package to our constituent groups. Some members of the coalition respond to this by saying, give me what is important to me, and forget about the other Republicans. This is the politics of the shrinking pie, and it will not work.
The politics of the expanding pie is that, if we can regain our majority (which I think is maybe 50-50), we can get into the business of strengthening our majority through constructive legislation whereby each of our groups gets a good chunk of what it wants.
On the other hand, some people think the election of Hillary Clinton and expanded Democratic majorities in the Congress and in our state governments would be a good thing because once the American people "learn their lesson," they'll turn to a (conservative-dominated) Republican Party.
But, if you look, for example, at Massachusetts, you don't actually see this. Middle-class people leave high tax-states, and the place becomes increasingly Democratic. If Massachusetts were a soveriegn country, it would proceed apace, like Zimbabwe, to hyper-inflation and ruin. I don't think it's a good idea that we gamble with the future of our country that way.
Conservatives don't think we should "cut and run" from Iraq. This is because they don't think the Iraqis will "learn their lesson" about Islamic extremism, and turn to moderate, democratic political leaders. They think a bad situation will turn into a worse situtation. Why, then, do any conservatives think we should "cut and run" from the United States, accepting defeat in 2008, on the basis that the American peple will "learn their lesson" about Democrats?