GIULIANI'S ONLY REAL HURDLE

A headline at the L.A. Times's Top of the Ticket blog is "New Iowa poll: Romney, Clinton lead, Rudy a poor fourth." In The New York Observer, former NYC public advocate and near-mayor Mark Green says a principal hurdle for Giuliani is that "it's hard to survive a fourth-place finish in Iowa."

If Rudy loses the nomination fight, this will be the reason. The press will certainly want to make the Iowa results a huge story -- not only the inevitable Romney win but any other other surprises (Huckabee third? Ron Paul over 1%?).

Alas, I think Rudy's going to beat this one. It helps that the guy who's going to win Iowa is a guy nobody likes anywhere else in America. Beyond that, I just think Giuliani has will -- and I'm deliberately using a word with a lot of unnerving connotations. I think he's just going to keep going, and he's going to declare that anyone who says the race is over after one state is an idiot, in that I'm not raising my voice and I'm using polysyllabic words but you know I'd smack you across the room if I could get away with it tone that routinely intimidates people -- and it will intimidate the press. And so the race won't be over.

Will is probably Republicans' most potent weapon -- when they seem in retreat, when it seems that all forces are trending against them, they just keep going, and eventually the conventional wisdom changes. Will is what Republicans in Congress had when they impeached Clinton after the '98 elections, and this eventually wounded Gore enough to put Bush in the White House. Will is what Bush had on Iraq after the '06 elections and the release of the Iraq Study Group report, and he got to keep his war, even through the supposedly magical month of September '07. Will is what the gun lobby has every time there's a firearms massacre. (And will, of course, is precisely what Democrats lack.)

It shouldn't routinely work, of course. The press should be able to look these guys in the eye and say, "Yeah, you're really sure of yourselves, but you're still wrong." But that rarely happens. Beltway journalists believe whatever they're told with absolute conviction.

As far as the nomination fight goes, I'm not saying Giuliani has a monopoly on will. Romney has it, too. (It's just about all he has besides money.) But Giuliani has will and the 9/11 myth and the myth that he single-handedly invented crime reduction and tamed the rabble in New York. Thompson and McCain and Huckabee don't seem to have will at all.

Republicans have willed themselves through many situations in which they were absolutely in the wrong. Rudy just has to will himself past a media-created bit of conventional wisdom -- that whoever wins Iowa is automatically the front-runner, even if the winner is extremely unpopular in the rest of the country. I fear he's not going to have much trouble pulling that off.