Barbara at the Mahablog is somewhat baffled by the fact that Rudy Giuliani is still at the top of the heap in the GOP, despite (among other seeming dealbreakers) his stance on abortion. She writes:

But if the New Conventional Wisdom among Republicans is that a candidate's stand on abortion doesn't matter, where does that leave the "right to life" movement?

Well, it leaves the anti-abortion crowd pretty much where the seal-the-borders people are relative to George W. Bush: They disagree with him, but most of them support him on everything else, so they're with him overall ... however, they'll attack him mercilessly the minute he tries to cross them on this one issue. Giuliani as president won't get a judicial nominee past the anti-abortion folks without a fight -- assuming he'll even bother to try, given his stated preference for "strict constructionist" judges.

Do you really think these people are going to go away if Giuliani becomes president? The press might say their power has waned, but the press has been saying things like that about religious conservatives since the Scopes trial. Trust me, they'll lick their wounds and come back. And they're raising a whole new crop of home-schooled kids to be the next generation of zealots.

I agree with what Barbara says after that -- up to the last sentence:

The old CW was that, somehow, being opposed to abortion gave Republicans an advantage because they would gain the loyalty and support of the "pro-life" crowd without paying a penalty from the moderate majority, who had other issues on their minds. It also gave the GOP "moral clarity," in that they had a simple, easy-to-explain position ("I'm agin' it"). Dems, on the other hand, had to be nuanced, since being enthusiastically for abortion is unacceptable and might give poor Wolf Blitzer the vapors. So Dems fell back on "I don't like abortion personally but I think it should be a woman's choice." But any position that can't fit on a standard bumper sticker is not "clear" in Mass Media Pundit Land and is held against Dem candidates even when it reflects a mainstream point of view.

Now that the front-running GOP candidate is making the "I don't like it personally, but ..." argument, expect the pundits to suddenly shut up about moral clarity and discover the virtues of nuance. And if the "pro life" movement loses its kingmaker power, expect the leadership of the GOP to stop taking its calls.

Barbara's right about most of that -- if Giuliani's the nominee, the same press that praised "moral clarity" in the past will decide this time around that nuance is wonderful. The press always gets Democrats coming and going -- if they try to finesse the abortion question, their morality lacks "clarity," but if they stand for choice, they're exclusionary and have "litmus tests" and engage in "Stalinist purges" and what about poor old Bob Casey in '92? (Never mind that the Casey story is nonsense and Casey's anti-abortion son is now a Democratic senator.)