Kind of following up on my previous post about where things stand, poll-wise, for the GOP presidential nomination, Ryan Sager in the NY Post has a piece today on Rudy Giuliani, the surprisingly strong front-runner. Allowing that it’s early for this kind of speculation, it is very interesting how conventional wisdom on Giuliani’s strengths and weaknesses is appearing to prove incorrect. As in:

* But Rudy’s got a problem in the South, right? Wrong. At least not in Georgia or Florida, according to work by Strategic Vision, a GOP polling firm not affiliated with any ‘08 campaign. In Florida, Rudy led McCain 39 percent to 28 percent in a June poll. In Georgia, Rudy leads 27 percent to 22 percent.

* But McCain would trounce Rudy in those states if people knew about his positions on abortion and gay rights (and his marital history), right? Wrong again. Strategic Vision CEO David Johnson told me of some “push polling” in Florida and Georgia – where his firm told voters about Rudy’s positions and marital problems and about McCain’s support for campaign-finance reform and working with Democrats against President Bush.

The effect on Rudy’s numbers, Johnson said, “underwhelmed” his expectations significantly, merely putting the two candidates into a statistical dead heat – not launching the more conventionally conservative (at least on issues like abortion) McCain into the lead. “Some people who identify themselves as strong conservatives, even when we did do the push-poll questions in Georgia and Florida, were still more willing to go with Giuliani,” Johnson said. “Strong, Christian conservatives.”

* Same story nationwide: In the Quinnipiac thermometer poll released last month, which asked registered voters to rate their feelings about politicians on a scale of 0-100, Rudy came out as the most popular politician in America among Evangelicals – with a rating of 66, against McCain’s 57 and George W. Bush’s 60.

With numbers like these, it seems safe to assume that Rudy will indeed run. Once he starts running, his fate will be in his own hands. He’s got the obvious edge when it comes to the general positive impressions that people have of him, but it will come down to some hard issues and he will have to explain himself in a persuasive way. Conservative voters won’t vote against their most important values — notwithstanding these early polls. If anyone can finesse himself through such a dilemma (and not lose all credibility in the process), Giuliani might be that person. Having seen him up close for 8 years while he was the mayor of New York City, I personally reached the conclusion that he was simply the most intelligent person I’d ever seen in politics. I haven’t changed that view. He is a really, really smart guy. As regards foreign policy and security issues, there’s no one I would feel better about at this point. As regards economic policy, he has the right credentials, having achieved things in New York City — in terms of tax cuts and reductions in the welfare rolls — that few would have believed possible. Still, those “social issues” (be it abortion or gun control) cannot be discounted, and I don’t believe that Rudy can simply say, “Let me get away with these things, because I’m so good on the other things.” Instead, he would need to come up with a rationale as to why he would govern in a more conservative way, as President of the United States, than his previous history would lead one to believe. It would need to be both cogent and sincere for it to persuade a critical mass of Republican primary voters. He could center it around a distinction between his personal views (generally liberal) and his current view of how the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted (e.g., according to original intent?). Intellectually, it’s certainly possible to make a case as to why those things do not have to be contradictory.

Without doing something like the above, I don’t seem him winning, although he’ll probably still run, because his early numbers are just so good.

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