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"  On the first Saturday of February, Nancy French, a 32-year-old writer, sat on the dais of a ballroom in Columbia, South Carolina&amp;#039;s Radisson, sawing through a piece of rubbery chicken as she waited to deliver the keynote speech at a meeting of the South Carolina Federation of Republican Women. French, though younger than the majority of her audience, shared a worldview with most of the women who&amp;#039;d converged in the capital city of perhaps the reddest state in the crimson South\u2014she is a mom of two young children; an evangelical Christian; a contributor to NewsMax, a hyperconservative website; and the author of A Red State of Mind, a collection of humorous essays about the trials of a onetime pageant girl from Paris, Tennessee, whose husband&amp;#039;s career plunked her down into the liberal bastion of Philadelphia. Just as she was about to go on, a phalanx of men in dark suits stormed through the back doors. At the center stood the surprise guest speaker, Rudolph W. Giuliani. He was still seven days away from officially declaring his candidacy for President, but the very fact that he was in Columbia buttering up local pols spoke volumes, considering that no Republican has won the White House without first winning South Carolina since 1980, the year the state started holding its &amp;quot;First in the South&amp;quot; Republican primary. On his slow, smiley march to the dais, all those Republican women\u2014nearly 100 of them\u2014leaped to their feet to applaud. Did they remember that Giuliani had nearly whacked his own future in the party by supporting the losing reelection of paleo-liberal Mario Cuomo over Republican George Pataki in the 1994 New York governor&amp;#039;s race? Or his penchant for divorcing, his support for government-funded abortions and gun control legislation, and a reputation for dressing in drag, a habit that led him on one occasion to get nuzzled by Donald Trump? Or how, in the midst of his separation from his wife, he left his family in Gracie Mansion and crashed at the apartment of Howard Koeppel, a car dealer living with his much younger boyfriend? How he ate cereal every morning with the couple and Bonnie, their shih tzu, and how Koeppel would help him coordinate his neckties and Rudy would call him &amp;quot;Mother,&amp;quot; in a tableau that had endeared him to New Yorkers specifically because such an arrangement would seem so foreign to folks who belonged to something called, say, the South Carolina Federation of Republican Women? That freewheeling, party-hopping guy was the Rudy of September 10, 2001; this one might as well have been an entirely different character. This Rudy was the man who stood tall for America on 9/11, so naturally the Republican ladies would put down their sweet tea to stand for him. These days he certainly looks different from how he had for much of his mayoralty. Gone is the pallor that suggested too much time under fluorescent City Hall lights, and the determined, funereal gait that always conjured to me the Tall Man, the evil undertaker from the Phantasm movies who&amp;#039;d dispatch a team of flying, blade-studded silver balls to Cuisinart your brains if you crossed him. The Rudy on the campaign trail is tanned, and the stoop-and-hunch walk has given way to a Dudley Do-Right, arm-pumping stride. When he poses for photos, his smile is so wide, you wonder whether aides have somehow rigged his lips with invisible fishing line. Even Nancy French got on her feet for the new, improved Rudy, though she was so convinced that Mitt Romney was her guy that she cofounded evangelicalsformitt.org, largely because he had renounced the tolerance he had for abortion as Massachusetts governor. &amp;quot;I support flip-floppers if they flop in the right direction,&amp;quot; French says. &amp;quot;If you think it&amp;#039;s okay to suck a baby out of the womb, that&amp;#039;s where I draw the line.&amp;quot; It was over this issue, French says, that the Rudy love cascade evaporated. During a Q&amp;amp;amp;A session, an elderly lady meekly raised her hand and asked, &amp;quot;Would you consider yourself a pro-choice or pro-life candidate?&amp;quot; The room was like an Old West town before a showdown. &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;m against abortion,&amp;quot; he began. &amp;quot;I would advise anyone against abortion. But I don&amp;#039;t want women who have abortions to be thrown in jail.&amp;quot; According to French, Rudy seemed to want to fill the ensuing silence by saying something else, but all that came out of his mouth was an incomprehensible stutter. A few people in the front started to giggle; then the giggling spread throughout the room to the point where one of the women on the podium felt the need to deliver an admonishing shush. &amp;quot;It was a very real moment of awkwardness between social conservatives and him,&amp;quot; French says. &amp;quot;I thought, Man, he can stare down terrorists no problem, but he gets challenged by a little blue-haired old lady, and he just can&amp;#039;t take it.&amp;quot; This cold afternoon in South Carolina seemed to predict what would befall the candidacy of Rudy Giuliani. Most observers\u2014particularly those who&amp;#039;d lived in New York City during more than just that one day of his eight years as mayor\u2014assumed he was running the campaign equivalent of the &amp;quot;Macarena&amp;quot;: a short, dizzying frenzy followed by a thudding hangover and sober inquiries into what insanity could have compelled Dad to gyrate so at Aunt Bess&amp;#039;s seventieth birthday party. Giuliani, the logic went, would poll high for his 9/11 name recognition. Then, after a dose of press scrutiny of his record on social issues, his shocking-even-to-cosmopolitan\u2013New Yorkers personal life, and his dictatorial obstinacy\u2014the quality that caused former Mayor Ed Koch, who supported him for mayor twice, to call his Giuliani book Nasty Man\u2014Republicans would rush into the waiting arms of a safer candidate, such as the relatively consistent conservative John McCain or the slick, TV-doctor-handsome Romney. And half of that did happen. In the months after Giuliani&amp;#039;s official announcement, a heavy press sludge started raining down. His legacy as New York&amp;#039;s corruption fighter was blackened when reports surfaced that, despite earlier denials, he had been briefed that his former business partner, Bernard Kerik, had ties to a mobbed-up business before Giuliani appointed him New York City Police Commissioner. Not even his messiah of 9/11 mythology was secure. One of the country&amp;#039;s largest firefighter unions accused him of &amp;quot;egregious acts&amp;quot; in the name of speeding the cleanup at Ground Zero; specifically, of seeming more concerned with recovering a bank&amp;#039;s buried gold than with excavating rescue workers&amp;#039; remains. But it was his issues with the women in his life\u2014the &amp;quot;weirdness factor,&amp;quot; as his own mayoral campaign once dubbed it\u2014that seemed to be producing a pronounced fishy smell about his candidacy, one particularly pungent to women whose votes he would need. After all, McCain&amp;#039;s 2000 candidacy in South Carolina was grounded by a false whisper campaign about his fathering an illegitimate child and innuendos that his imprisonment in North Vietnam had made him crackers. What woman, after seeing news footage of Giuliani announcing to reporters he was divorcing Donna Hanover\u2014before he&amp;#039;d bothered to inform her\u2014could vote for this man? Were Giuliani just a cheater in the Clinton-Kennedy mold, the choice would be simple: Either hold your nose and vote for the hound dog, or don&amp;#039;t. But with Giuliani, you could lock a busload of shrinks, political scientists, and women&amp;#039;s studies professors in a room with the task of unpacking his knotty relationships with women, set them loose on New Hampshire primary day, and still be greeted with a whole lot of head-scratching. He&amp;#039;s the chief pirate in the political equivalent of a No Girls Allowed tree house, but then he abandons the fort to help his girlfriend pick out a skirt. He falls in love so hard, so fast, and so deep, but then\u2014poof!\u2014it&amp;#039;s as though she never existed. He&amp;#039;s one of the strongest, most committed allies the pro-choice lobby ever had, until the day he&amp;#039;s not anymore. And seriously, what&amp;#039;s the deal with that kooky new wife? On that last question, it&amp;#039;s hard to provide an up-close testament about the curvy, big-eyed, Pennsylvania-coal-town-reared former Judith Stish, because she&amp;#039;s nowhere to be seen three months later back in South Carolina, this time in the ballroom at the College of Charleston, where Giuliani&amp;#039;s campaign is throwing an impromptu Town Hall meeting. She was also conspicuously missing the night before, 120 miles north in Columbia, at the second Republican debate. It was a very good night for Rudy, certainly stronger than his performance two weeks earlier at the Reagan Library debate, where he had barely been able to squeeze in a 9/11 mention and in a seeming effort to please both sides on the abortion question had alienated both by saying that it would be &amp;quot;okay&amp;quot; if Roe v. Wade were overturned but also &amp;quot;okay&amp;quot; if it weren&amp;#039;t. Judith&amp;#039;s absence is especially curious considering that people who&amp;#039;ve observed the couple socially say that the first thing they notice is how she makes a habit of staying within a few feet of her husband. Perhaps it&amp;#039;s because she&amp;#039;s had personal experience seeing how vulnerable Rudy is to feminine charm. Or maybe it&amp;#039;s just that Rudy wouldn&amp;#039;t have it any other way. &amp;quot;Rudy&amp;#039;s not comfortable being alone,&amp;quot; says Manny Papir, who, until he was fired in 2002, spent nine years as Rudy&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;body guy,&amp;quot; the staffer who traveled with him everywhere. &amp;quot;He always needs people around him. And if you&amp;#039;re the woman in his life, you&amp;#039;re kind of required to be around.&amp;quot; During the years Papir spent with Rudy, there was actually a designated seat reserved for that woman\u2014right in the front row of his chauffeur-driven Suburban. Donna Hanover stopped riding around with her husband early in his first term as mayor and was replaced by Cristyne Lategano, with whom Giuliani seemingly became inseparable. The abrasive young press secretary and the mayor were joined at the hip, and not only at public events. The pair was spotted skirt-shopping in Midtown Manhattan early in his mayoralty, an errand so unorthodox that it made the local papers. It was Lategano whom Hanover tearfully referenced as the staffer who&amp;#039;d made it difficult for her to participate in her husband&amp;#039;s public life, when she held her own May 10, 2000, press conference just hours after Giuliani announced their separation to reporters in Bryant Park. But by that time, that particular relationship\u2014which Lategano and Giuliani have denied was romantic\u2014was over. Soon to take Lategano&amp;#039;s seat in the truck was the woman Rudy described at that same press conference as &amp;quot;my very good friend&amp;quot; Judith Nathan, a divorced pharmaceutical saleswoman who had slipped Giuliani her card on a spring night at a cigar bar within weeks of the end of his close association with Lategano. Before she was outed as the girlfriend, there were clandestine dates; Papir says that he and Kate Anson, Giuliani&amp;#039;s scheduler, referred to each other as &amp;quot;the alibis&amp;quot; since the mayor always insisted they accompany Nathan and him to dinner or the movies, fostering the impression that city business was taking place. Longtime Rudy watcher Wayne Barrett, the Village Voice writer and critical biographer, says that despite appearances, Giuliani is &amp;quot;not a philanderer in the traditional sense of the word. He actually falls in love each time.... And it&amp;#039;s a swoon.&amp;quot; No doubt he&amp;#039;d once been besotted with Hanover; Rudy testified\u2014too much, for some tastes\u2014to his ardor when he referred to her as &amp;quot;my lover&amp;quot; in his first inaugural speech. In The New York Times announcement of his 2003 wedding to Nathan, Rudy likened first laying eyes on her to the &amp;quot;thunderbolt&amp;quot; Michael Corleone felt when he saw Sicilian village girl Apollonia in The Godfather. Those who know Giuliani say he&amp;#039;s never had trouble charming women, whatever his relationship with them happened to be. While mayor, he&amp;#039;d hold court late into the night at Gracie Mansion, spinning intricate yarns about the eccentric mob characters he&amp;#039;d encountered as a prosecutor. His Vito Corleone impression, complete with cotton balls stuffed in his cheeks, always killed. But he also had another talent that particularly appealed to women, a rare quality for a silverback alpha like Giuliani to possess. &amp;quot;Rudy is a remarkably good listener,&amp;quot; says someone who has known him many years. &amp;quot;And he&amp;#039;s as quick to listen to a smart woman as a smart man.&amp;quot; Perhaps it was Giuliani&amp;#039;s beloved late mother, Helen, who taught him to seek female counsel and comfort. Giuliani has always credited her with instilling in him the desire and confidence to succeed in school\u2014and he repaid her by buying her an apartment on East 86th Street, right next door to him and Donna. In what might be seen as a recapitulation of his pattern with his mom, the former mayor leans on women to validate his worth, says the Giuliani associate, especially in tough times: &amp;quot;Rudy almost never acknowledges fear in the middle of a crisis. But when he works with a smart, loyal woman, he lets his guard down faster than he might with a man and builds strength from these close relationships.&amp;quot; None of this is to suggest that Giuliani is surrounded by a paid harem of protectors; indeed, that is part of the conundrum of Rudy and the opposite sex. While there are indeed women on his staff\u2014such as Beth Patrone, his longtime assistant, and Sunny Mindel, the press secretary who went straight from berating City Hall reporters to berating those who called up his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners\u2014his inner circle is dominated by white guys he has known for years. Like Randy Mastro and Denny Young, two lawyers who hail from Giuliani&amp;#039;s days as U.S. Attorney in New York, and his closest adviser, Peter Powers, his best friend from Brooklyn&amp;#039;s Bishop Loughlin High School. Still, there&amp;#039;s always that one special woman given elevated status. &amp;quot;Rudy&amp;#039;s a macho, dominating guy in this high- testosterone environment,&amp;quot; says Giuliani biographer and WCBS TV News correspondent Andrew Kirtzman, who has been covering the politician since 1993. &amp;quot;But he still needs this female alter ego.&amp;quot; Hanover was actually uniquely qualified to fill the role. Giuliani met the Stanford- and Columbia J-School\u2013educated news anchor in Miami in 1982; even before he&amp;#039;d told Hanover that, technically, he was still married to his second cousin, Regina, he was giddily calling friends and announcing that he was going to marry her. After his divorce\u2014and subsequent church annulment, on a niggling doctrinal point after 14 years of marriage\u2014Hanover became his wife. In his winning 1993 campaign, she deftly coached Rudy on the art of the sound bite and consulted on nearly every element of his media strategy. She even recorded several spots accentuating the tender side of the froth-mouthed prosecutor. &amp;quot;Rudy is such a great dad,&amp;quot; Hanover cooed in a TV ad titled &amp;quot;Gentle,&amp;quot; which featured images of Rudy holding baby daughter Caroline and sailing a model boat with son Andrew. &amp;quot;I wish all those people who think he&amp;#039;s so tough could see him with children. That&amp;#039;s the real Rudy.&amp;quot; Four years later, Hanover wouldn&amp;#039;t even tell reporters if she&amp;#039;d vote for her own husband for reelection. Though it would be another three years before they&amp;#039;d actually split, Hanover&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;real Rudy&amp;quot; seemed to have given way to a guy so consumed by his job that he rarely managed to eat dinner with his family. &amp;quot;I liked it better before Daddy was mayor,&amp;quot; said Hanover to a staffer about what Andrew had told her. &amp;quot;Because then he actually paid attention to me.&amp;quot; And shortly after he&amp;#039;d taken office, it seemed, Hanover&amp;#039;s advice wasn&amp;#039;t nearly as coveted as that which had gotten him elected in the first place, especially in light of how First Lady Hillary Clinton&amp;#039;s health care initiative was being panned in Washington. &amp;quot;Donna was told that Rudy didn&amp;#039;t want another Hillary,&amp;quot; says a onetime high-level Giuliani staffer. The woman who had put her television career on hold to help secure her husband his dream job found herself consigned to the meet-and-greets of a traditional First Lady. Enter 28-year-old press secretary Lategano, who, though having more experience selling sneakers than fielding questions from journalists, seemed to have an extraordinary sway over the mayor&amp;#039;s decisions. Unlike Hanover, she wasn&amp;#039;t at all a softening presence. &amp;quot;Would you be willing to throw yourself in front of a bus for Rudy Giuliani?&amp;quot; was one of Lategano&amp;#039;s stock interview questions for prospective aides. And it is she who Kirtzman says was behind Giuliani&amp;#039;s damaging decision to write off the city&amp;#039;s black leadership as cronies of former Mayor David Dinkins, his African-American predecessor. During the time that Giuliani was alienating the entire New York Republican establishment by supporting Cuomo over Pataki for governor, the former associate remembers being in a meeting in which the mayor was railing about the Republican Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari. &amp;quot;Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!&amp;quot; the aide remembers Lategano shrieking, in Lady Macbeth fashion. Rudy giggled. &amp;quot;I think he got off on it.&amp;quot; Even his closest consigliere was unable to break through that bubble. When Peter Powers, Giuliani&amp;#039;s deputy mayor and oldest friend, left the administration late in the first term (he has now rejoined him for the presidential run), he publicly cited a desire to work in the private sector. Others saw it differently. &amp;quot;Peter left over Cristyne,&amp;quot; Kirtzman says. &amp;quot;He was apoplectic. His primacy in Giuliani&amp;#039;s life was being supplanted by this inexperienced woman whom he didn&amp;#039;t respect at all, who he felt was having a toxic effect on Giuliani.&amp;quot;  Judith Nathan came into Rudy&amp;#039;s life at perhaps his most vulnerable moment, and she arrived with all the right tools. Not only was he facing what looked like a losing battle against Hillary Clinton for the Senate, he&amp;#039;d been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the disease that had killed his father 19 years before. As luck would have it, Nathan had been trained as a nurse, and she got busy with her laser printer, compiling booklets about the different procedures. Whatever succor he derived from her apparently trumped his political ambitions; Republican leaders were shocked when after the tabloids started sniffing around Nathan, rather than shelving his paramour until after the Senate election, his office instead issued a press advisory so that the papers could snap photos of him walking her home after a cozy dinner on the Upper East Side. She even had the clout to persuade Rudy\u2014a man who&amp;#039;d clung to his disappearing follicles for decades\u2014to finally abandon the comb-over, Papir recalls. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t say anything,&amp;quot; Judith instructed Papir as he entered Rudy&amp;#039;s suite on an out-of-town trip. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m trying something.&amp;quot; Inside, he saw his boss with that long blanket of hair that had been swept across his head for so long, slicked back and hanging down on his neck. Judith&amp;#039;s request was unnecessary, Papir says. He always held his tongue; it was one of the reasons Rudy appreciated him. But on a trip to Europe, a sort of post\u20139/11 European victory tour, where Giuliani would first collect an honorary knighthood from the Queen, then pick up the German Media Prize in Baden-Baden, Papir says he made the grievous mistake of opening his mouth at the wrong time. He&amp;#039;d kept quiet when he heard that in London, Judith had brought the whole motorcade to a halt so she could get a cup of coffee, causing the entourage to miss its private jet&amp;#039;s takeoff at Heathrow. (&amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve driven Joan Collins around,&amp;quot; one of the motorcycle cops told him, &amp;quot;but we&amp;#039;ve never seen anything like this one.&amp;quot;) He&amp;#039;d also kept quiet, when, upon arriving in Baden-Baden, Judith told him to cancel her American Express payment for the hair coiffing she&amp;#039;d just gotten for the knighthood ceremony; since they&amp;#039;d been guests of the Queen, shouldn&amp;#039;t Her Majesty pick up the bill? But finally\u2014after having grown tired of waiting for Judith in a hotel lobby in Baden-Baden\u2014Papir griped to some others in the Giuliani contingent, &amp;quot;So you&amp;#039;re waiting for Princess too?&amp;quot; Papir reckons that it was this comment that ended his $200,000-a-year run serving America&amp;#039;s mayor. Though Papir would certainly seem to have a big ax to grind with Nathan, he sees the episode as instructive to voters. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t wish her ill,&amp;quot; Papir says, &amp;quot;but she should not be First Lady. And I don&amp;#039;t say that lightly, because I love him. But she has total power. God forbid she manipulates him when he&amp;#039;s trying to make a major decision, because that&amp;#039;s all he&amp;#039;ll have on his mind. I&amp;#039;ve seen it a million times.&amp;quot; But if she still possesses that power in Giuliani&amp;#039;s life, why isn&amp;#039;t she here in South Carolina? It is still two weeks before the National Enquirer will report that a bleached-blond motivational speaker from Houston had been telling friends she&amp;#039;d been bedded by Giuliani (though both he and the woman deny it). But there had been plenty of bad news in the previous months that could explain why he hadn&amp;#039;t invited the missus to the Bible Belt. There were all those stories detailing the ugly split from her former husband, Bruce Nathan, who in 1992 divorce papers accused her of being an unfit mother, insatiable social climber, and regular employer of the epithet &amp;quot;Jew boy&amp;quot; when he wouldn&amp;#039;t buy her something. (She accused Bruce\u2014who was, at least, actually Jewish\u2014of beating her.) Then there was the secret first marriage discovered by the Daily News; in the seven years the couple had been together, the Giuliani camp had never bothered to correct the impression that she&amp;#039;d been divorced only once. There was the March revelation that neither of Giuliani&amp;#039;s children planned to campaign for their dad, that Rudy had skipped his son&amp;#039;s high school graduation, and that Andrew was barely speaking with his father, largely because of the &amp;quot;little problem that exists between me and his wife.&amp;quot;  Even seemingly friendly venues proved dicey. A week after Elizabeth Edwards had been utterly candid with the press when discussing her recurrent cancer, Judith Giuliani was on 20/20 with Barbara Walters, invoking an Angelina Jolie\u2013like desire to &amp;quot;keep private&amp;quot; how she had even met her husband. A pastel sweater tied around her shoulders, she caressed Rudy&amp;#039;s face while he absolved her of any guilt in the rift with the kids and said his wife could attend any cabinet meeting she wished\u2014a promise his campaign retracted the day after the segment aired. His advisers reportedly viewed the rollout of the wife as an unmitigated disaster. While Judith was proving to be a headache for Rudy&amp;#039;s campaign, the abortion issue was threatening a decapitation. Former Giuliani deputy mayor Fran Reiter, for one, was pretty confused after reading what her old boss had said at the first Republican debate, when he initially wobbled on Roe v. Wade and then pronounced that as President he&amp;#039;d appoint &amp;quot;strict constructionist judges&amp;quot; in the mold of Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas\u2014the quartet most feared by those who want to keep abortion legal. Reiter, a chain-smoking, trucker-mouthed New Yorker who ditched the Democrats in the &amp;#039;70s for New York&amp;#039;s Liberal party (having decided Jimmy Carter was too conservative for her tastes), had been Giuliani&amp;#039;s closest counselor on abortion rights. It was she who prompted him to publicly declare he was pro-choice, despite his personal reservations about the procedure. He spelled out his stance on The Phil Donahue Show in 1989, when he said that if his daughter told him she were pregnant, he&amp;#039;d urge her to keep the baby, but that ultimately the choice was hers. And if she decided to get an abortion? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d support that,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d give my daughter the money for it.&amp;quot; Reiter also persuaded him to back controversial ancillary reproductive issues, including his eventual endorsement of public funding of abortions and his opposition to both a parental consent law and a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. His positions, Reiter says, were too consistent to be construed in 2007 as mere pandering to liberal New Yorkers. &amp;quot;If it had been done for political expediency\u2014and I don&amp;#039;t think it was\u2014that wouldn&amp;#039;t explain why he became such a standard bearer for the pro-choice movement,&amp;quot; she says. Watching Giuliani stammer at the debate, Kelli Conlin, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice NY, actually felt bad for her old friend, whom she fondly remembers standing beside at City Hall when he issued a proclamation celebrating the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. &amp;quot;I could see the pain on his face,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Here was a man whose national reputation is built on his unwavering convictions, struggling with what to say because his convictions might conflict with the values of Republican primary voters. It was heartbreaking.&amp;quot; The Giuliani Conlin knew was a man who fought for a state law imposing tougher penalties on those who interfered with the operation of abortion clinics. &amp;quot;Our opponents, who were willing to lay down in front of clinics, understood they had a strong enemy in Rudy Giuliani,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He projected an aura that he would have no tolerance for that behavior. He was the number-one reason blockades of clinics subsided.&amp;quot; Both Reiter and Conlin were stunned that Giuliani&amp;#039;s team allowed him to set foot on the stage of the Reagan Library without a more coherent position. &amp;quot;If I were in that campaign, I&amp;#039;d have fired all the advisers,&amp;quot; Conlin says. &amp;quot;They never thought about how they were going to deal with the issue? It was just boneheaded.&amp;quot; Says Reiter: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very unleaderlike to run away from what clearly is a record. The only shot he has with [social conservatives] is to be very consistent and say, `This is who I am. This is what I believe. But we need to agree to disagree, because these are not the critical issues facing America today.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Which is, essentially, the approach he unfurled in June, when he spoke to religious conservatives at Regent University. After praising the &amp;quot;many, many contributions&amp;quot; of the school&amp;#039;s founder, Pat Robertson\u2014who in a 2005 interview agreed with Jerry Falwell&amp;#039;s novel claim that 9/11 had been caused by &amp;quot;pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, [and] lesbians&amp;quot;\u2014Giuliani said, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t expect that you&amp;#039;re going to agree with me on everything. But if you agree with me about enough things, and you think I have the ability to lead, then maybe I&amp;#039;m the person you can support.&amp;quot;  There seemed to be something of a parable in the fact that the morning of the South Carolina debate, a grossly overweight Jerry Falwell dropped dead. Even with all those baby killings in the world, and all that man-on-man love threatening his way of life, it was fatty food in the end that he perhaps should have feared the most.  What I kept hearing in South Carolina was that as far as social issues go, the state is evolving. Yes, there are still hard-core conservatives, like Nancy French and the 1,000-plus other members of the South Carolina Federation of Republican Women. But consider how far this pocket of the south has come on race, some locals said: In 2004, just over the bridge from Columbia in ultra-conservative, ultra-white Lexington County, Nikki Randhawa Haley, a daughter of Sikh parents, defeated a good old boy who&amp;#039;d held the District 87 seat in the State Legislature for 28 years. (&amp;quot;And her daddy wears a big ol&amp;#039; diaper on his head,&amp;quot; one of her constituents helpfully pointed out over drinks at a bar.) &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know any gay-bashers, and I don&amp;#039;t hear anything about the issue unless somebody&amp;#039;s running for something,&amp;quot; says Frances P. &amp;quot;Mickey&amp;quot; Lindler, the 66-year-old president of Lexington County Republican Women.  Lindler is a bit of an eccentric bombthrower in the local party; while she favors some gun control, she keeps a Lady Smith &amp;amp;amp; Wesson pistol under the seat of her car. Rudy&amp;#039;s views on abortion don&amp;#039;t bother her or many of her friends, she says, though they might very well call themselves prolife in public. &amp;quot;Privately, a lot of women tell me, `I&amp;#039;d never have one, but it&amp;#039;s not our business,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s God&amp;#039;s business. You can&amp;#039;t legislate; you shouldn&amp;#039;t get into these moral issues.&amp;quot; The data suggest Lindler is onto something. Jon Lerner, a prominent pollster in Washington, DC, wrote in the National Review that while 65 percent of Republican primary voters in the state identified themselves as pro-life, only 25 percent of that group named abortion as its top priority\u2014ahead of that, most people put security and the economy. (And a third of Republicans are avowedly pro-choice in the first place.) The breakdowns, Lerner wrote, mirror those in the other important early primary states: New Hampshire and Iowa. And even though Lindler says Rudy&amp;#039;s personal baggage &amp;quot;bothers&amp;quot; her, she wouldn&amp;#039;t hesitate to vote for him in the general election, especially if he were running against one candidate whose morality really does get under her skin. &amp;quot;Here I&amp;#039;m going to turn female on you,&amp;quot; she warns. &amp;quot;Hillary stayed with Clinton for many reasons, when I would have left him. She prostituted herself for career, for power. She&amp;#039;s a bright, smart lady. Why did she just throw a lamp at him? Leave the man!&amp;quot; Even French, the writer who says tolerance for abortion is where she draws the line, admits she&amp;#039;d &amp;quot;walk over glass&amp;quot; to pull the lever for Giuliani over Clinton. So much for the evangelicals staying home on election day.  The next morning in Charleston, Pat McKee, a charming, blue-eyed 62-year-old woman with painted toenails and a gigantic travel mug of coffee, sits next to me at Giulian&amp;#039;s Town Hall meeting, fresh from dropping her bichon frise at the groomer. McKee says that she and her husband\u2014both retired software developers\u2014sold their house in San Diego and relocated here, a town that has become a mecca for well-to-do retirees. She&amp;#039;s Republican, but one who&amp;#039;s pro-choice and enjoys watching The Daily Show with her husband, a Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.  Because of character issues, she says that she could never be persuaded to vote for Clinton. Giuliani&amp;#039;s faults, however, don&amp;#039;t faze her. Even squiring Judith Nathan to dinner in full view of cameras while his wife was still living in Gracie Mansion? &amp;quot;Well, he&amp;#039;s open and honest,&amp;quot; she replies. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t that what that says?&amp;quot; What about the fact that his kids don&amp;#039;t talk to him? &amp;quot;Kids are important,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but I also know parents whose kids don&amp;#039;t speak to them, and it had nothing to do with the parents. You have kids that are maybe bipolar who tend to be estranged from their parents.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s highly unlikely that Giuliani&amp;#039;s kids are bipolar, I tell her\u2014but she&amp;#039;s unmoved. However, something does move her: the mere mention of 9/11. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going to cry now,&amp;quot; she says, with an embarrassed laugh, and then the tears start falling down her cheeks. &amp;quot;I cried for days. His strength really helped us.&amp;quot; McKee says that while her two kids were growing up, she&amp;#039;d lived in New Jersey, and the family would spend days at the Jersey Shore. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d go to Sea Bright Beach, and on a clear day the only thing in New York you could always see was the Trade Center,&amp;quot; she says, still sniffling. &amp;quot;It was a terrible thing, and so many people have forgotten it.&amp;quot; In just a few minutes, Giuliani will punch through yet another set of doors, and everyone in the room will rise, a testament that this crowd hasn&amp;#039;t forgotten. And outside of the room, maybe if millions of others just keep remembering 9/11, it will prevent them from being pulled toward the honey-dipped Southern drawl of Fred Thompson; or from caring much when Thomas Ravenel, Giuliani&amp;#039;s South Carolina campaign chair, is indicted for buying a mound of cocaine; or being bothered when Sen. David Vitter, the Southern regional chair of Giuliani&amp;#039;s campaign, is outed as a onetime patron of DC Madame Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Maybe if the memory of that tragedy is strong enough, it will overcome he fundamental fuzzy logic of Giuliani&amp;#039;s whole campaign: Though he behaved admirably\u2014perhaps heroically\u2014on 9/11, electing him president for being a terrorist fighter is sort of like appointing subway hero Wesley Autrey as Transportation Secretary. Starting in February, we&amp;#039;ll all find out whether the memory of one single day is potent enough to blot out the memory of thousands of Rudy Giuliani&amp;#039;s nights. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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