I have really been trying to stay out of the ’08 presidential discussions, since it’s, you know, ’07, but the Giluliani questions has really been heating up over the past week, so here we are.

The American Spectator rounds up some opinion:

Are pro-lifers ready to bargain with pro-choice Republican frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani? Noemie Emery recently made the case that they are, but last week the editors of the National Catholic Register said no deal.

The editorial expressed concern that "a pro-abortion Republican president would no longer preside over a pro-life party," leaving millions of abortion opponents without a major party home. Whether this and other careful criticisms of the popular politician signal the beginning of a pro-life backlash against Giuliani may help decide the 2008 GOP presidential race.

So far there is little concrete evidence that Giuliani’s pro-choice position is hurting him either among Republican primary voters or the kind of conservative activists who attend events like CPAC. But a Wall Street Journal poll found something that should give America’s Mayor pause: "Fully three of four Republicans — including a majority of those backing the former New York City mayor — say they would have reservations if they learned Mr. Giuliani supports abortion rights and supports civil unions for gay and lesbian couples." If those numbers are accurate, a deal might be farther away than it seems.

Giuliani began his public life as an opponent of abortion. As late as when he was competing for the Liberal Party’s ballot line in his unsuccessful first mayoral race, press accounts described him as pro-life and against Roe v. Wade. In August 1989, the New York Times reported that Giuliani was now unequivocally pro-choice, a shift that "represented the culmination of a struggle between the candidate who has consistently said he personally opposes abortions and his advisers who said he could not appeal to the general electorate with anything short of the ‘choice’ stand adopted by many other Roman Catholic politicians, like Gov. Mario M. Cuomo."

Once Giuliani made this calculation, he never looked back. That November, he advocated taxpayer-subsidized abortion. A YouTube video shows Giuliani saying, "There must be public funding for abortion for poor women." He also criticized then President George H.W. Bush for vetoing publicly funded abortions for the District of Columbia.

In his 1993 rematch with David Dinkins, Giuliani again campaigned as a pro-choice candidate. He opposed the Hyde Amendment, which forbids Medicaid financing of abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger. According to excerpts of an internal campaign document posted on SmokingGun.com, his advisers believed his position on abortion was a major asset. "Simplicity is the best response to questions about abortion," they wrote. "Giuliani is pro-choice. He supports public funding for abortion. He will continue city funding of abortions at city hospitals. Nothing more, nothing less."

After he was elected mayor, Giuliani delivered on these campaign promises — and more. His 1994 and 1998 tax returns show $500 in donations to Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider. In 1996, the mayor issued a proclamation declaring it "Planned Parenthood Day" in New York City and praising the group’s eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.

For the past weeks, Giuliani has been playing the judicial card, saying that he supports the kind of judges Bush is appointing and would do the same. Byron York, at The Corner, (where the discussion has raged) posts a report of a news conference this morning in which Louisiana Senator David Vitter endorsed Giulani:

Judges became a theme of the press conference as the speakers addressed, without directly addressing, the differences that Giuliani has with the pro-life conservative Republicans who make up a significant part of the GOP primary electorate. Washington lawyer and former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, who has also endorsed Giuliani, was on hand this morning, and he too stressed Giuliani’s position on judges.  "I think that President Giuliani will appoint the kind of judges we expect in this country," Olson said, "people who respect the rule of law and the role of judges."

Giuliani himself picked up the theme in his remarks.  "Because of my view of the Constitution and how important it is to our freedom, I would do everything I could to appoint judges who would interpret the Constitution rather than execute their own social policy," Giuliani said.  "That takes a great deal of discipline.  Your job as a judge is to figure out what the framers meant when they wrote the Constitution…not, in retrospect, what you would like it to mean."

The subtext of the news conference was what has become the subtext of the Giuliani campaign.  Will the issue of national security outweigh the concerns of those Republicans for whom abortion and marriage are threshold issues?  Giuliani is betting that the answer is yes.  And he’s also betting that he can win not just on the issue of national security, but also of leadership and competence.  At the news conference, Vitter was asked whether Giuliani would be a "tough sell" in Louisiana.  "I don’t think he’s going to be at all," Vitter said.  "Especially after Katrina."  The message: Rudy Giuliani is a guy who can get things done. 

I see one flaw in this calculation, and it has less to do with individual voters and endorsements than with boots on the ground in the months before Election Day.

There is a lot about politics that has changed in the past decades, but one that hasn’t is the importance of getting out the vote on election day, and getting those votes to go your way. That involves using voter lists to make calls, it involves door-to-door stuff (still), it can even involve leafleting, etc. It involves driving people to the polls. Every vote counts, these groups know that, and they know they can make the difference.

For the past thirty years, pro-life groups have done an enormous amount of that work for the GOP, particularly in the South and Midwest.

My question is – will pro-life and pro-family groups throw themselves, body and soul, into getting the vote out for Giuliani?

Somehow…I can’t see it.