Rudy’s road to the White House

Chuck Todd Chief White House correspondent and political director • Profile

WASHINGTON - So who is the stronger frontrunner for their respective party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani ?  My answer might surprise you. Considering where things are right now in both primary fights, factoring in money, the calendar and certain intangibles, a strong case can be made that Giuliani’s tenuous grip on the frontrunner tag is as strong, if not stronger than Clinton’s.

This may seem nuts to think considering the slew of polls showing Clinton leading and her standing in the early states improving, but remember this campaign is about more than poll standing right now. And don’t get too caught up in the Giuliani poll standing right now since we are in the midst of a Fred Thompson bump. Talk to me in a month if this Thompson tightening continues, but until then, tread carefully.

Most new candidates get a good 1 or 2 week run and Thompson is experiencing that right now. In fact, it’s the second time Thompson has gotten a poll bump. The first one was in May-June and that lasted about a month, with Thompson sliding slightly and Giuliani floating back up above the 30s in national polls.

Can Giuliani survive this second Thompson bump? My gut says yes. After all, Giuliani has passed every other test so far.

For months, I’ve been a part of the Washington chattering class that’s been waiting for the supposedly inevitable Giuliani collapse. Consider some of the conventional wisdom many of us have espoused:

• Surely his personal life will take him down.
• If not his personal life then his business dealings or …
• Maybe the fact that he’s had some questionable hires (see Kerik, Bernie) or …
• Maybe the fact that he can lose his temper at the drop of a hat will show the “old” Rudy won’t tolerate silly questions from Iowa conservatives.
• Oh, and don’t forget those liberal social positions, just wait until South Carolina evangelicals find out he lived with, not one, but TWO gay men.

I’m sure I’ve left something out of the above graph, but the fact is none of this has come to pass yet. And with barely more than 100 days until the Iowa Caucuses (I’m assuming a caucus date of Jan. 3 or Jan. 5), it’s getting late in the game for Giuliani’s opponents to start hoping (or willing) for one of these baggage issues to bring Rudy down.

One wonders if Giuliani’s opponents believed the chattering class’s collective conventional wisdom as strongly as the conventional wisdom folks themselves. For those assuming the media would take Giuliani down, they were sadly mistaken. The media doesn’t go after candidates without the help of other campaigns. 

But forget Giuliani’s poll standing or perception standing with pundits, the biggest change in this campaign in the last month has been the primary calendar and that’s where one can definitively see an advantage for Giuliani over Clinton in their respective paths to the nomination.

Picking the president — the candidates Click a name below to visit that candidate’s MSNBC page • Joe Biden                 • Sam Brownback     • Hillary Clinton          • Chris Dodd • John Edwards         • Rudy Giuliani           • Mike Gravel              • Duncan Hunter • Mike Huckabee        • Dennis Kucinich     • John McCain           • Barack Obama • Ron Paul                    • Bill Richardson      • Mitt Romney            • Tom Tancredo • Fred Thompson To subscribe to a candidate page RSS feed, click here.

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