HE HAS HIS OPPONENTS JUST WHERE HE WANTS THEM

So, Rudy, how's that big-state strategy working out?

... Even in his home state of New York, Giuliani now trails John McCain....

New polls released Monday from the Marist Institute and Siena find Giuliani running second.

Marist shows McCain leading in New York with 34 percent of the Republican vote with Giuliani and Romney tied at 19 percent each....

Siena shows McCain ahead with 36 percent to 24 percent for Giuliani, 10 percent for Romney, and Huckabee and Thompson in mid single digits.

A Friday Rasmussen poll of California voters finds Giuliani has dropped to fifth place there.

It has McCain ahead with 24 percent, Romney second with 17 percent, Huckabee and Thompson at 13 percent and Giuliani behind with just 11 percent of GOP voters favoring him there.

A Hartford Courant poll in Connecticut also shows McCain leading in the northeastern state. It has the Arizona senator at 39 percent while 16 percent of GOP voters there support Giuliani, 11 percent support Romney, 8 percent favor Huckabee and six percent like Thompson.

Giuliani is third in Massachusetts as a Thursday Survey USA poll has Romney winning there, as expected, with the backing of 48 percent of Republicans, McCain supported by 34 percent and Giuliani third with 8 percent.

A Rasmussen poll released Thursday from New Jersey also shows Giuliani fading as McCain leads there with 29 percent to 27 percent for the former mayor. Romney and Huckabee are tied at 10 percent in the survey.

And in Pennsylvania, a Keystone Poll from Thursday has McCain leading with 30 percent to 14 percent for Giuliani, 12 percent for Huckabee and the rest of the GOP field in single digits.

I got this roundup from the anti-abortion site LifeNews. The anti-Rudy schadenfreude is subtle -- but what's interesting to me is the lack of disappointment at McCain's rise. Much has been made of GOP wariness of McCain, but if LifeNews is not trying to oversell the chances of Huckabee or Thompson or Romney, you can add that to the cheerleading of David Brooks and Bill Kristol, and the decidedly not horrified acknowledgment of reality by the likes of Robert Novak and Dick Morris, and the conclusion is obvious: The GOP is coming to terms with McCain's near-inevitability, and is starting to like it.

McCain's only real impediment right now is Mitt Romney -- Rasmussen's Florida poll shows Romney rising to a lead there as Huckabee sinks. Clearly, that's no coincidence -- a number of social conservatives must have decided that Huck can't win, have heard their marching orders from Rush, and are switching to the Mittster.

As a Democrat, I fervently hope for this trend to continue. But I don't see how it can matter -- not with so many urbanized states voting on Super Tuesday, states where the Republicans are a tad less wingnutty than the national average -- the slice of the GOP that seems to like McCain the most.