Republican Shift?

The WSJ has a story today, "Giuliani Support Hints at Shift" in the Republican party's emphasis on social issues, but the race remains tight:

Quarterly fund-raising reports released this week show Mr. Giuliani also led in the three months ended June 30, raising $15 million for the nomination contest, ahead of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's $14 million and Mr. McCain's $11 million. In the first quarter, Mr. Romney bested the former New York mayor on this front.

In Iowa, a Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus goers -- who tend by a wide margin to be conservative -- shows Mr. Romney ahead of Mr. Giuliani, 30% to 17%. But those same voters ranked terrorism and national security as their leading concerns, above sixth-place abortion.

I think the Bush appointments of Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court have taken the edge off social conservatives' angst. The war on terror is a largely a unifier among Republicans, the question is who can lead us better--Romney, Giuliani or someone else yet to officially enter the race. Social conservatives are concerned about the impact of radical Islam on civilized society and its overt threats to Israel and the Holy Land, moreso than libertarians, who tend to be isolationist. Libertarians only seem to stir themselves when free trade is at risk, and don't always remember that the US is the world guarantor of that kind of freedom too. And Republicans have always been concerned about taxes and the economy.

So I don't know if I would read too much into this polling yet, but one thing is certain---we all can't stand Hillary, and Obama is a babe in the woods, so we'll be thinking about who can win.

UPDATE: Daniel Henninger, WSJ:

In a wide-ranging interview with the Journal's editorial board last week at our offices in lower Manhattan, Rudy Giuliani talked a lot about terrorism. It may well be that 9/11 made the Giuliani presidential run possible, but I think the better political comparison isn't New York in September 2001 but New York in 1993, when Mr. Giuliani unseated Mayor David Dinkins. He described it to us:

"I was elected to reduce crime. That was the rationale for my being mayor of New York. They weren't going to elect a Republican prosecutor in New York unless they were desperate. And they were desperate: It was, 'We'll even give him a chance to do it.' "

This was the period of screwing stacks of deadbolt locks onto apartment doors in New York. Amid this, Republican Giuliani defeated Democrat Dinkins by 49% to 46%. This means that a lot of New York liberals, beset by the loss of physical well-being, went into the voting booth, pulled the lever for Giuliani, and walked out to tell their friends, "I voted for Dinkins."